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.

“Everybody is a migrant,” says the novelist Mohsin Hamid. In this episode, Miwa Messer interviews the award-winning author of pathbreaking works of fiction like Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, about his celebrated new novel Exit West, which combines a modern love story, a quirky fable, and a wryly hopeful look at the possibilities for a world in which borders are not walls. They begin the conversation with a lesson from Douglas Adams, about the secret of flying.

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In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. . . .

Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

Click here to see all books by Mohsin Hamid.

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

Photo of Mohsin Hamid by Jillian Edelstein

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Attica Locke has lived in Los Angeles for twenty-two years now, spending much of that time as a screenwriter for movies and television. But when it comes to writing fiction, her imagination still dwells in the South, where she grew up. In the small East Texas town where Locke set her propulsive fourth novel, Bluebird, Bluebird, an unofficial system of casual segregation persists. White folks patronize a bar called the Icehouse, while African-American residents congregate at Geneva’s, a ramshackle café. That static, uneasy coexistence is strained by the discovery of two murders — of a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman.

Mysteries often revolve around the search for justice, but the stories Locke tells are more frequently propelled by the call of social justice. She says the first time she read To Kill a Mockingbird, she strongly identified with Scout. Like Harper Lee’s young heroine, Locke is the daughter of a southern lawyer focused on civil rights, but she also went one better than Scout and married a public defender.

“What is special to me about law is that it is the place where we decide as a society what we will allow and what we won’t allow,” says Locke, sitting in a Pasadena café. “It’s why we have to define some things as a hate crime, to be able to say: this is such an abomination it deserves a special category.”

Darren Matthews, the African-American Texas Ranger who investigates the murders in Bluebird, Bluebird, is a specialist in crimes with a racial component. After graduating from an elite college up north, Matthews considered becoming a lawyer but instead returned home to become a law enforcer. Now he finds himself wrangling with a local white supremacist group called the Aryan Brotherhood, unraveling a double murder mystery, and vacillating between his belief in the law as a fallible but honorably intentioned mechanism for uncovering the truth and a mounting suspicion that America’s entire judicial system is “a lie black folks need protection from.”

Locke herself is torn by this struggle between trust and cynicism. “I think every black person’s relationship to justice is complicated,” she suggests. But Locke comes from a lineage of landowning Texans who rejected the Great Migration to the North and chose to stand their ground in the South. Looking at a family tree recently, she says, “I saw members of my family who became professors and state senators and who started schools where there weren’t schools. There really was a sense of civic engagement, a feeling that this place is ours as much as anybody else’s.” Locke wanted to knit that sense of black rootedness into the novel; Darren Matthews, she writes, can “feel the breath of his ancestors in the trees.”

Bluebird was finished before the 2016 presidential election, but the book’s crackling racial tension feels horribly well timed. The Texas Rangers leadership in the book refuses to acknowledge race has any bearing on investigations, making it near impossible for Matthews to do his job. Locke believes that this unwillingness to confront the unresolved legacies of white domination “infantilizes us and stops us from discussing important issues because we have no language or permission to talk deeply about it.” The strange intimacy of black and white in the South — “this familial thing that is odd and hard to capture” — is precisely what fascinates her.

Tucked inside the suspenseful twists of a mystery novel is a portrait of a place where white men’s lives “revolved around the black folks they claimed to hate but couldn’t leave alone.” Locke explains, “If you think of the idea that black women metaphorically nursed this nation into being, if you think that black labor brought this country into being, it’s like how you feel about your parents — no matter how much you hate them, you kind of know you owe every damn thing to them. It is my belief that there are some white folks who . . . cannot tolerate that level of power, and so it gets twisted around into a sick hatred. Underneath that is a love that can’t be understood or named.”

Although she’d been writing fiction since she was a kid, scribbling tales on the back of her father’s legal stationery, Locke didn’t think about writing a novel until 2004, when she grew disillusioned with her life as a Hollywood screenwriter. “Nothing ever got made, but I was very well paid,” she shrugs. “But I wasn’t really being myself.” So Locke and her husband took out a second mortgage on their house while she wrote her debut novel, Black Water Rising, which earned glowing endorsements from legends James Ellroy and George Pelecanos and a nomination for an Edgar, the mystery genre’s equivalent to the Oscar. Black Water Rising wove the history of American race relations into the tale of a lawyer and former civil rights activist ensnared in a murder case.

“I was really trying to write a simple, slick thriller,” Locke says with a throaty laugh. Instead she found herself sobbing on the floor of a Palm Springs hotel room as she realized how vulnerable the story’s themes of racial conflict made her feel. “I was about to color myself to the world. Which seems dumb, because I’m clearly black — but I was about to say to the world, I am not incidentally black. This is my worldview and it is tense in here. I am afraid in here.”

A stint writing for Fox’s hit show Empire has given her the courage to try to translate this painful vision of racial discord and power imbalance into television. While she writes a sequel to Bluebird, she is also percolating a pitch for a TV show based on the book series. Even talking about the project scares her.

“I am terrified that I will lay out these issues that feel life-and-death to me and it will be met with indifference by the industry, by executives,” Locke says, voice wavering. “This is a show about the existential crisis in a black man’s soul. If I get into a room with people going ‘Nyaah,’ it will break my heart.”

After a pause, Locke adds, “The good news about me is that I will be terrified and do it anyway.”

 

 

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Without extinction is Liberty! without retrograde is Equality!
They live in the feelings of young men, and the best women;
Not for nothing have the indomitable heads of the earth
been always ready to fall for Liberty.

—from Walt Whitman’s “As I Sat Alone by Blue Ontario’s Shores”

One of the most famous and successful campaigns in the history of American civic protest is celebrating its centennial this year. Organized by suffragist leader Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, the “Silent Sentinels” began their vigil outside the White House gates on January 1917, maintaining their presence there every day but Sundays for the next two and a half years — until the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed and women across America had the vote. The Silent Sentinel picket is regarded as the first organized protest conducted at the White House.

Some 2,000 arrived from across the nation to take Sentinel shifts, each of them given a pin inscribed “Without Extinction Is Liberty,” from Whitman’s poem. Aware that their actions were not only controversial but potentially dangerous, the women were committed to an orderly, placards-only presence. At first, President Woodrow Wilson seemed merely bemused, his only response to “Mr. President, what will you do for woman suffrage?” a tip of the hat or an invitation to tea (always refused). But after the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, the placards began to ask “Kaiser Wilson” how he dared call for liberty in Germany yet refuse to grant it at home, provoking antagonistic, pro-Wilson onlookers to disrupt and harass the suffragists. Taking these disturbances as their justification, the police began arresting the Sentinels for “obstruction of traffic,” punishable by fine or jail time (jail always chosen).

The Silent Sentinel protest reached a crisis point on October 20, 1917, when Alice Paul herself was arrested, imprisoned, and, when she refused to eat, force-fed. In Alice Paul: Claiming Power, J. D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry profile a woman who “became the soul and guiding spirit of the final years of the American suffrage movement” because she “publicly held politicians’ feet to the fire” and “made suffrage ‘cool,’ at least for the young and the young at heart.” A week after Paul’s arrest, 20,000 women marched through the streets of New York, carrying their own Silent Sentinel placards. The march and the escalating mistreatment of the imprisoned Sentinels soon had Wilson backed into a corner, and on January 9, 1918 — on the eve of the first anniversary the Silent Sentinels setting up their White House protest — he announced his endorsement of the Nineteenth Amendment.

In The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, Dava Sobel tells the fascinating story of how, even as the suffragists were marching and protesting for equality, some women were quietly gaining it. From inception, the Harvard Observatory hired women as “human computers,” charged with processing astronomical data. Annie Jump Cannon, a member of Paul’s National Women’s Party, was one of the Harvard women who went far beyond a processing role, earning international recognition for devising classification systems and observational principles still in use today. One of Cannon’s colleagues was Williamina Fleming, a Scottish immigrant and single mother who went from being a maid in the household of Edward Charles Pickering, director of the Harvard Observatory, to such eminence that she was asked to speak at the Congress on Astronomy and Astrophysics at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. “While we cannot maintain that in everything woman is man’s equal,” said Fleming in her talk, “yet in many things her patience, perseverance and method make her his superior.”

As told in Nathalia Holt’s Rise of the Rocket Girls and Margot Lee Shetterley’s Hidden Figures, a new generation of female human computers made similarly pioneering contributions to the aeronautics industry during and after World War II. The African-American math whizzes of Hidden Figures were forced to fight for equality on two fronts, given that they were segregated in their own building. Their achievement, says Shetterley in her Epilogue, offers encouragement to those who might otherwise “look into the national mirror to see no reflection at all, no discernible fingerprint on what is considered history with a capital H”:

There’s something about this story that seems to resonate with people of all races, ethnicities, genders, ages, and backgrounds. It’s a story of hope, that even among some of our country’s harshest realities — legalized segregation, racial discrimination — there is evidence of the triumph of meritocracy, that each of us should be allowed to rise as far as our talent and hard work can take us.

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The setting of Celeste Ng’s second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, is Shaker Heights, the storied Cleveland suburb where every blade of grass knows its place and every home is a shelter for lives of advantage and entitlement. The home of the Richardsons is one of just these, a stately manse where Elena Richardson, a reporter for the city’s smaller newspaper, lives with her lawyer husband and her four children: the dashing athlete Trip, the effortlessly beautiful Lexie, the artistic Moody, and the rebellious Izzy. Life is good for the Richardsons, the wealth of past generations accruing in the ease of the present one. Elena, herself a child of Shaker Heights, takes pride in raising another generation there, her brood beautiful and talented and confident in futures lubricated by ease and plenty and the good fortune bestowed by those who came before.

It is onto this well-ordered stage that Ng’s protagonist, Mia Warren, enters. If Shaker Heights stands for the stolid respect for convention, Warren has lived a life of thwarting it, restlessly moving from state to state with her teenage daughter, Pearl, in tow. If the Richardsons bow to the gods of convention and upper-middle-class restraint, Mia worships at the altar of art. A talented photographer, she takes on makeshift jobs, cleaning houses and waiting tables so that her days are free to pursue her photographic ambitions. If the carefully coiffed Elena is a somewhat mediocre reporter stuck at the less-than-best newspaper, Mia is gifted, her mesmerizing and haunting photographs selling at galleries in New York. Seemingly uninterested in either fame or fortune, she sells only a few, prioritizing authenticity of expression over ease of existence.

The lives of the two women collide when Mia rents a house that belongs to the Richardsons. The Winslow property (an oddity in rental-less Shaker Heights) is an inheritance whose rental income Elena doesn’t really need. She uses it as a means of padding her altruism — “helping” the less fortunate and, in the instant case, the picturesquely artistic. Before long, the lives of the Richardson brood are intertwined with those of Mia and Pearl. Following a landlady visit of sorts, during which Elena bestows much condescension on Mia’s work in process (“You should really do portraits”), the latter ends up cleaning the Richardson home in exchange for rent. It permits her to keep an eye on Pearl, who, besotted with plenty and regularity (and the elder Richardson son), spends all her afternoons at their house. As the plot progresses, the youngest Richardson child, the rebellious Izzy, becomes equally besotted by Mia’s artistry, making her way in the opposite direction to watch Mia wield her photographic craft.

The intertwining of the families, two contrasting models of motherhood equally possible in contemporary America, sets up the conflict that will drive them apart. Motherhood again is the fulcrum on which it turns. At the Chinese restaurant where she works, Mia befriends Bei Bei Chow, a young Chinese immigrant woman. Bei Bei, she learns, is in the grip of maternal tragedy that began when, bereft and nearly starving, she left her daughter at a fire station in Shaker Heights. She had meant to retrieve the child later, but when she tried to do so the baby was gone.

The baby is not gone. Mei Ling is now Mirabelle McCullough, the newly adopted and much adored adopted child of the McCulloughs, wealthy longtime friends of the Richardsons who had everything — except, of course, a baby. A custody battle ensues, with Mia and Elena staked out on opposing sides and much of Shaker Heights glued to its details. Ng’s narrative unfolds the disparate worlds within the apparent harmony of the community, with the needs of the Chinese immigrant who dishes up their takeout painfully colliding with the wants of the couple who lack only a baby. With the exposition comes the unraveling, the unspooling of the lies and subterfuge that shield the cossetted constituents of Shaker Heights. Nobody likes it.

In this, the central action of Little Fires Everywhere, Ng is masterful, exposing with terrifying acuity just how the well-meaning wealthy, afforded so much moral reverence in contemporary America, can be cruel and even evil. In underscoring how equipped she is to handle a Chinese baby, Mrs. McCullough points to the Chinese art on her walls and the fact that the baby “loves rice” and that in fact “it was her first solid food.” Consumption is not just a metaphor here; it is the sum total of her understanding of culture and identity and of the fact that she who has everything is entitled to still more, even to a baby to complete the picture of perfection.

Bei Bei Chow’s story, framed in Ng’s gripping fiction, is close to an actual one that took place in Indiana, a few hours’ drive away from Cleveland and Shaker Heights. In that case, a young Chinese immigrant, Bei Bei Shuai, was charged with murdering her newborn baby in March 2011. Shuai, who had fallen in love with a Chinese man who left her when she became pregnant, had tried to kill herself by ingesting rat poison. While Shuai survived, the baby died two days after it was born. Shuai became the first woman to be prosecuted for a suicide attempt, under Indiana’s feticide statute, originally enacted to protect women and their children from third parties such as abusive boyfriends and husbands.

The actual Shuai case was just as divisive as the one Ng presents, with the poor immigrant woman being denigrated as a baby killer and an unfit mother. Non-immigrant others, such as Shuai’s lawyer, were threatened with baseless disciplinary actions for trying to raise money for her client. The question of who qualifies as a good mother, and the idea that the state or the wealthy and the white must protect immigrant children from the cruelties of their unfit immigrant parents, are woven through Little Fires Everywhere. In the Shaker Heights of the novel, cultural and racial identity is only incidental — something to be overcome, as Lexie Richardson’s black boyfriend and Asian best friend seem to be doing by ascending class. “Mothers like her keep the cycle of poverty going,” the same boyfriend reports his father as having said. Belonging with the white and wealthy requires shedding contrary opinions, lining up dutifully with the Richardsons and the McCulloughs.

The magic and mastery of fiction lies in its ability to extract the truths that are otherwise lost in the chaos of life, the details and rationalizations that cover them up, subtracting their sting. Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere does just that, isolating and teasing out the threads of class conformity, racist fear, and the hierarchies and codes that partake subtly of both. Little fires have become a conflagration by the end of the book: the Richardsons’ home is burned to a husk; the McCulloughs’ baby is missing, as is the Richardsons’ own youngest child; Mia and Pearl have left for another town. In real life, devastation is almost routinely the fate of the far less endowed, the Bei Bei Shuais and the Mia Warrens. Fiction, at least, can offer up its own kinds of justice.

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