Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.

It’s been more than 200 years since the Grimm Brothers first defined the “fairy tale” as we now know it, but its atmosphere of enchantment, peril, hunger, desire and transformation still fascinates. In her bestselling debut novel The Hazel Wood, YA author Melissa Albert deploys humor, thriller-level excitement, and a head full of bewitching tales to fashion a coming-of-age story for the haunted teenager inside us all. She joins Bill Tipper on this episode to talk about her love of the uncanny and the strange adventure of 17-year-old Alice Proserpine.

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Seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother have spent most of Alice’s life on the road, always a step ahead of the uncanny bad luck biting at their heels. But when Alice’s grandmother, the reclusive author of a cult-classic book of pitch-dark fairy tales, dies alone on her estate, the Hazel Wood, Alice learns how bad her luck can really get: Her mother is stolen away—by a figure who claims to come from the Hinterland, the cruel supernatural world where her grandmother’s stories are set. Alice’s only lead is the message her mother left behind: “Stay away from the Hazel Wood.”

Alice has long steered clear of her grandmother’s cultish fans. But now she has no choice but to ally with classmate Ellery Finch, a Hinterland superfan who may have his own reasons for wanting to help her. To retrieve her mother, Alice must venture first to the Hazel Wood, then into the world where her grandmother’s tales began—and where she might find out how her own story went so wrong.

Like this podcast? Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher to discover intriguing new conversations every week.

Author photo of Melissa Albert (c) Laura Etheredge

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Martha Jefferson, the president’s brilliant oldest daughter, married a troubled third cousin, raised and educated a passel of children, and settled with her father at Monticello.

Her congenial but less scholarly younger sister, Maria, made a love match with another cousin but died a few years later, leaving only a single son to carry on her line.

Then there was Harriet, Thomas Jefferson’s daughter — historians now mostly agree — with the enslaved Sally Hemings, half sister to Jefferson’s dead wife. With Jefferson’s permission and a cash gift, Harriet left Monticello as a young woman, passed as white, and disappeared from history.

The story of all three women is ably told — to the extent possible, given the gaps in the historical record — in Catherine Kerrison’s Jefferson’s Daughters. An associate professor of history at Villanova University, Kerrison has produced a feminist biography that draws on the revisionist consensus that Jefferson fathered Hemings’s children.

Her book is, naturally, indebted to the scholarship of Annette Gordon-Reed, author of the Pulitzer Prize−winning The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008). Earlier, in Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), Gordon-Reed had marshaled the arguments in favor of a decades-long Jefferson-Hemings relationship. DNA testing in 1998 all but confirmed the liaison, linking Jefferson’s paternal line — and not that of his Carr nephews, as some had surmised — to Sally’s son Eston Hemings.

Historians now could no longer dismiss the 1873 account of Eston’s brother Madison, who claimed Jefferson as his father and described his mother as Jefferson’s “concubine.” Madison said he, along with Eston, their brother Beverley, and their sister Harriet, owed their adult manumission to a promise the future president had made to their mother in Paris. Their freedom, Madison told an Ohio newspaper, was a precondition of Sally Hemings’s agreement to leave France, where she would have been free, and return to Virginia with Jefferson.

Gordon-Reed, in her Hemings biography, relies on educated guesswork and imagination to tease out the contours of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship, as well as Jefferson’s feelings toward their children and the attitudes of Jefferson’s white family toward his unconventional (if not entirely uncommon) ménage. Kerrison faces similar difficulties. Relying on extant letters and the inventive use of other sources, her mostly chronological narrative reinterprets these women’s lives through a feminist lens and tries to distinguish between the factual and the speculative.

Of the three sisters, Martha, a prodigious correspondent who was both her father’s “emotional caretaker” and a woman “universally admired for her lively wit, high intelligence, graceful manners, and animated storytelling,” led the best-documented life. The recently widowed Jefferson took Martha — called Patsy in the family — with him in 1784 to a diplomatic posting in Paris and enrolled her, at eleven, in an elite convent school. There she quickly learned French, made friends, and (to Jefferson’s displeasure) embraced Catholicism. Kerrison devotes considerable attention to her education, not the most bracing of topics. More interesting is the author’s take on Martha’s abortive courtships and the manner in which Martha’s discussions with friends may have prepared her for the “serious business” of marriage.

At five, Maria — whose childhood name was Polly — stayed behind in Virginia with her baby sister Lucy (who died at three of whooping cough) and her maternal aunt, Elizabeth Eppes. So happy was Maria with her aunt that she resisted rejoining her family in Paris. She lost that battle and then developed a second attachment, in London, to Abigail Adams, another surrogate mother. Maria eventually sailed to France, attended by the teenage Sally Hemings.

Kerrison emphasizes that the job of middle- and upper-class women in the eighteenth century was to marry well and bear children. Both were fraught enterprises. (Jefferson’s wife had died in childbirth.) Martha’s marriage to Thomas Jefferson Randolph at first seemed promising, producing eleven children who survived to adulthood. But the relationship was undermined by Randolph’s “volatile temper” and financial reverses.

By contrast, Maria, educated in Paris and, later, Philadelphia, enjoyed “a happy union” with her cousin and childhood friend Jack Eppes. Kerrison insists that historians have slighted her “emotional maturity” and “emotional and financial independence.” But Maria inherited her mother’s frail constitution, and childbirth was difficult for her. She died at twenty-five, leaving a daughter, Maria, who survived only to age two, and a son, Francis, who became a cotton planter in Florida. Martha meanwhile lived to sixty-four.

Their illustrious parentage notwithstanding, their lives were not unusual for women of their era. Their half sister Harriet’s was a different story.

In 1994, Barbara Chase-Riboud, author of the bestselling fiction Sally Hemings, imagined Harriet’s post-Monticello life in a historical novel titled The President’s Daughter. In the novel, the fictional Harriet turns her back on her family, marries twice, and survives the Civil War. Her brother Eston describes her as a “believer in romantic love and race oblivion.” Kerrison sets out to uncover what really happened to Harriet after Monticello. The task is not a simple one: “[S]he obliterated her historical tracks so well, there has not yet been a single credible claim of descent from her,” Kerrison writes, setting up her own pursuit.

Relying on Madison Hemings and other oral histories, Kerrison posits that Harriet either followed or accompanied her brother Beverley to Washington. As per Madison, she assumes that Harriet married within a few years of her arrival, raised a family, and kept mum about her connection to Monticello and her black ancestry. (As seven-eighths white, Harriet not only looked white but, Kerrison says, would have been considered legally white under Virginia law.)

Using the limited available records, Kerrison tracks a series of Harriets, with various surnames, through the years. It’s a prodigious undertaking, and the reader is likely to share the excitement of the chase. Among other clues, Kerrison looks for children’s names that echo Monticello and Hemings family traditions. One lead in particular tantalizes her, but the evidence is contradictory, and the conscientious Kerrison doesn’t press the case. “I concede defeat,” she writes. “Harriet Hemings will keep her secret” — at least for now. What might have been a headline-making discovery turns out to be yet another lesson in the stubborn mysteries of history, and the contingent fragility of our knowledge of the past.

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In Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, the naive protagonist, Hans Castorp, serves as the rope in a tug-of-war between two ideologues, Naphtha and Settembrini, each of whom wants to shape the young man in his own image. Settembrini is a well-meaning humanist and cosmopolitan, an heir to the nineteenth-century tradition of liberal rationalism; everything he says is morally admirable. Naphtha, on the other hand, is a proto-fascist, an irrationalist and totalitarian who claims that the future belongs to mass movements and their cruel leaders; everything he says is dire and ominous. The problem is that Settembrini is a weak man spouting tired platitudes, while Naphtha has the ferocious charisma of a true believer. What is a liberal to do, Mann asks, when the devil has all the good tunes?

 

This question was prophetic when Mann posed it in 1924; now, almost a hundred years later, it feels frighteningly relevant once again. Liberals in Europe and America are in a justified panic. Writers like Timothy Snyder, Masha Gessen, and Yascha Mounk are issuing urgent warnings about the return of populism and nationalism, the decay of international institutions, the pollution of the public sphere by lies and propaganda. They are completely right; meanwhile, the public continues to vote for Brexit in the UK, Victor Orban in Hungary, the Law and Justice Party in Poland — and, of course, Trump in the United States. As in the 1930s, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

 

Rob Riemen, author of the earnest new book To Fight Against This Age (Norton), undoubtedly belongs on the right side of this political and cultural battle. As the founder of the Netherlands’ Nexus Institute, he has spent his life bringing liberal intellectuals together to talk about the great problems of the day. His previous book, also a short tract, had the unimpeachable title Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal. Alas, To Fight Against This Age suggests that Riemen has not found a way to overcome Settembrini-ism: for all his rectitude, he leaves the reader feeling depressed and discouraged. One even begins to wonder if this is how all liberals and cosmopolitans sound to their enemies — rhetorical, simplistic, and self-righteous.

 

To Fight Against This Age is a pamphlet-length volume made up of two parts. The first is an essay, originally published in 2010, titled “The Eternal Return of Fascism”; the second is a parable or fable titled “The Return of Europa,” in which we overhear a kind of idealized Nexus symposium, where a group of wise men debate the future of Europe. Both pieces were written by a European for a European audience, and take for granted a set of beliefs about the value and nobility of the European idea that outsiders, including Americans, might greet with a certain amount of skepticism. Essentially, Riemen believes there is nothing wrong with Europe that the best traditions of Europe can’t cure; and his book is a tract or sermon recalling Europeans to the “Judeo-Christian tradition” and “spiritual, universal values” that alone can save them from creeping fascism and/or the dominion of technology.

Riemen knows that, in today’s Europe, anyone who invokes the Judeo-Christian tradition is likely to be seen as a conservative, and specifically as an Islamophobe. That is why he takes pains to distance himself from figures like the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, for whom European values are best expressed by hating Muslim immigrants. “In the Netherlands,” Riemen writes, “what the Party for Freedom [Wilders’s party] actually offers is the shameless opposite of the Judeo-Christian and humanist traditions: vulgar materialism, oppressive nationalism, xenophobia, ammunition for resentment, a deep aversion to the arts and the exercise of spiritual values, a suffocating spiritual bigotry, a fierce resistance to the European spirit, and continuous lies as politics.”

Western values, Riemen believes, need to be defended against their defenders. After all, Hitler came to power promising to protect European values against the menace of Bolshevism. But if fascism is on the march in Europe today, as Riemen believed in 2010, and as there is even better reason to fear today, the question is what makes it so attractive. What can liberals offer the public to defuse fascism’s appeal? One obvious answer to this question might be economic: fascism is a version of plutocracy, while social democracy aims to empower individual citizens. Perhaps there is a connection between the erosion of social-democratic rights over the last two generations and the rise of desperate, angry people eager to find a scapegoat for their problems.

 

Riemen is probably in sympathy with this view — he writes acidly about the “business elite” that has “poisoned society with the idea that earning a lot of money is the most important thing in life.” But even this suggests that it is ideas, not money or power, that really concerns him. Fittingly, for an intellectual, he believes that the cure to Europe’s problems is intellectual. It involves such things as “spiritual and moral training,” “moral and cultural foundations,” “living in truth, doing what is right, creating beauty, and other such radiantly vague phrases.

None of this is politically reactionary, but you don’t have to read too far before you realize that it is culturally reactionary, in the strict sense. Riemen believes that Europe once had a rich and ennobling culture, under the tutelage of great thinkers and artists, and that it can only survive by returning to that elite cultural regime. The real source of fascism, he believes, is what he calls “a kitsch society,” one in which “nothing is absolute, nothing is eternal either: everything is finite and transitory.” In general, he thinks, people are content with pleasure where they should be striving for nobility of spirit. Europe needs to go back to “the humanistic teachings of Socrates and Spinoza.”

These are fascinating examples, almost Freudian slips in the context of Riemen’s argument; what they actually signify is the opposite of what he thinks they prove. For Socrates, of course, was put to death by the people of Athens, and Spinoza, after being excommunicated by the Jews of Amsterdam, saw his writing banned and censored by the Christian authorities. Far from being the founders of European culture, they were outsiders, marginal figures, even saboteurs of European culture, which was — then as now — dominated by the values Riemen derides as “kitsch.” Tellingly, Riemen never gives an actual date for the era when Europe was ostensibly guided by “spiritual values.”

In the second section of the book, Riemen personifies what he thinks of as the true, lost Europe in the figure of Europa, from Greek mythology. If “Princess Europa” returned to her namesake today, she would find that “from this Europe, the European spirit has gone.” The only way to woo her back, Riemen goes on to suggest, is to refuse to bow down to the false idol of science and go back to worshipping “spiritual values,” such as “truth, goodness, beauty, love, and patience.” Who could argue with this? But precisely because they are inarguable, such calls to virtue constitute an ideological mystification of the most naive kind. To really understand where we are and where we’re headed, we need actual thinking, which is usually uncomfortable (as Socrates loved to point out). To Fight Against This Age, despite its title, is more lullaby than call to arms.

 

 

 

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Lisa Halliday’s cunning tri-part novel is one of the most exciting debuts I’ve read in a long time. Asymmetry works on several levels, beguiling readers with two absorbing, seemingly unconnected narratives while exploring questions about what literature can do to transcend our personal experience and “reduce the blind spots” in our lives.

The book opens in Manhattan at the start of the Iraq war, with a December-May romance between a famous older writer and a young editorial assistant with more ambition than direction. Halliday pulls us deep into this offbeat relationship before jumping to a second, initially disorienting story about a young Iraqi-American economist — en route to visit his older brother in Kurdistan — who reflects on his life after being detained by immigration officials at London’s Heathrow airport.

We meet the twenty-five-year-old protagonist of the first section, “Folly,” sitting on an Upper West Side bench, trying to read a book whose long paragraphs and lack of quotation marks annoy her. When a man eating a Mister Softee sits down next to her, she recognizes him instantly. So do passersby. Halliday keeps the paragraphs short and punchy, and the dialogue neatly set off in quotation marks. “What else do you read?” he asks. “Oh, old stuff, mostly.” “So,” said the man, rising, “What’s your name?” “Alice.” “Who likes old stuff. See you around.”

Within weeks, she’s accepting a dripping cone, since “multiple-Pulitzer Prize winners don’t go around poisoning people.” When he asks if she’s game, she answers, “Well, no reason not to be, I guess.” He retorts, “There are plenty of reasons not to be.”

And they’re off to a quirky wonderland. Alice’s full name is Mary-Alice Dodge, a deliberate nod to Charles Dodgson and his most famous creation as Lewis Carroll. Curiosity runs through Asymmetry deliciously, like fudge ripples. Alice holds a looking glass up to Ezra Blazer, a playfully fictionalized portrait that channels Philip Roth, down to his repeatedly being bypassed for the Nobel Prize.

Halliday can be very funny, in a wry, snappy way. When Alice first sees Ezra’s numerous surgical scars, she asks, “Who did this to you?” “Norman Mailer,” her aging paramour quips. She notes that, given his delicacy, sex with him “could feel like playing Operation.” They lob accusations of “cradlerobber” and “graverobber” across his vast bed.

It’s an asymmetrical relationship from the start. Initially, Ezra calls the shots — disappearing to his country house for months on end to write, singing, “The party’s over . . . ” when he wants Alice to leave. He calls her sweetheart, feeds her great books and the best writing on the Holocaust, and funds upgrades to her wardrobe and her sweltering walkup. They share a passion for baseball, though not the same team. (Thanks to her grandmother, she’s a Red Sox fan at a propitious time, the year the curse is broken.) Their repartee is wonderful. “Is she still alive, your grandmother?” he asks. “Yep. Would you like her number? You’re about the same age.” “It’s a little early in our relationship for you to be satirizing me, Mary-Alice.”

How does Alice feel about all this? Is she using him? No more than he’s using her. “Do you ever think this isn’t good for you?” he asks. She says he makes her happy.

Naturally, things change. He needs additional surgeries. She picks up his arcane grocery requests at Zabar’s and starts to think about her long-term plans. “If there were a pill that would make her a writer living in Europe and another that would keep him alive and in love with her until the day she died, which would she choose?” she wonders. (Note: the Massachusetts-born author currently lives in Milan, Italy.) After she expresses guarded criticism of his new novel, he says, “I know what you’re up to.” “What?” “You’re writing. Aren’t you?”

This is where Halliday folds her literary origami in unexpected ways, and Asymmetry starts to assume a new shape. When Ezra encourages Alice to write about her complicated father, she tells him that “writing about myself doesn’t seem important enough.” But, she wonders, is it even possible that “a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness” of a completely different human being?

I don’t want to spoil the surprises, so suffice it to say that we come to realize that Halliday’s book, like so many first novels, is about searching for one’s place in the world. What isn’t like so many first novels is the assurance and brilliance with which she manages this. Questions about shifting power dynamics and stepping outside yourself to discover your true mettle are further explored in the second section of the novel, “Madness.” While not as delightful as “Folly,” it is ultimately just as moving and even more thought-provoking.

Halliday plants sly hints about what she’s up to throughout all three sections, saving oblique revelations for the poignant, hilarious coda, an interview featuring Ezra as a castaway on the long-running BBC4 radio program Desert Island Discs. Along the way, she raises penetrating questions about the creative process and its limits. If writers like Sheila Heti ask, “How should a person be?” Halliday considers issues of cultural appropriation and asks, “What should a writer write?” In a particularly telling passage, she notes that the writer “can hold her mirror up to whatever subject she chooses, at whatever angle she likes — she can even hold it such that she herself remains outside its frame, the better to de-narcissize the view.” Still, she says, “there’s no getting around the fact that she’s always the one holding the mirror.”

Asymmetry has already been anointed with a Whiting Award, an uncannily prescient herald of literary promise whose previous recipients include Alice McDermott, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Anthony Marra, Elif Batuman, David Foster Wallace, and Colson Whitehead. It’s not a stretch to say that Lisa Halliday, on the strength of this sophisticated first work, belongs in that company.

 

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