Even in England, Jon Savage’s 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded hasn’t been reviewed as broadly or warmly as his definitive 1991 Sex Pistols biography England’s Dreaming or his century-straddling 2007 social-intellectual history Teenage. And in the U.S., it’s been totally, and unjustly, ignored. I figure the problem is twofold. First, while at bottom a work of history, 1966 isn’t merely music-centered — unlike the highly subcultural England’s Dreaming, it’s pop-centered. Second, while Savage is right to see the year when “the ’60s” became what we mean by that metonym as epitomized by its pop music, in the U.S. and the U.K. both history and music were racing toward the future in parallel, not identically. They “exploded” simultaneously, but somewhat differently.

Pop — not “serious” enough. U.S.-U.K. — dueling perspectives? Nevertheless, as someone who began writing about 1966 and its panoply of aftermaths as I turned 24 in the East Village that year, I learned a lot I didn’t know from Savage, who began the year as a London 12-year-old glued to pirate radio. Although he’s less comfortable describing the American phenomena he had to come here and research than the British ones he’s long since incorporated into his discursive apparatus, he’s careful to give the two nations equal time.

In fact, one of 1966‘s chief virtues is how dutifully and agilely this British freelance intellectual finesses these double complexities. Of course he focuses on singles rather than album — beyond Beatles–Stones–Dylan, 45s were still where the conceptual action was. But on both sides of the Atlantic he finds sociohistorical gold in not just major artists but utter obscurities — in what has to be called “art” because it was too weird for “pop.” Nor does he make the fatal error of privileging the “pop groups” soon to be designated “rock bands” over black artists. On the contrary, James Brown and Motown in particular get many pages and unmitigated respect. But typifying his schema’s pitfalls is something I’d never grasped — in Britain, the Motown classics covered by both the early Beatles and the early Stones remained more cult items than hits until Motown enlisted effective U.K. record-biz partners in 1965. I’m grateful to Savage for clearing this up. But, if only because it’s literally impossible for him to squeeze everything in, he doesn’t explore it enough.

The complexities begin with an Anglocentric generalization in a January chapter that builds to the sentence: “The pace of life quickened in the mid-sixties, and the fear of nuclear annihilation was the rocket fuel.” This gave me pause — while “the Bomb” was without question a potent metaphor in post-WW2 America, the ban-the-bomb movement and hence bomb consciousness remained relatively marginal here. But as Savage reminds us, in Britain the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament — fueled, I’d venture, by Britain’s ingrained left traditions and the still-fresh horrors of the Blitz — was mobilizing a counterculture by 1958. Yet as Savage then explains, the CND had “peaked in about ’64-’65,” leaving the U.S. to set the decade’s political tone via both its Vietnam War, which embroiled a draftee army that numbered 185,000 at the beginning of 1966 and 385,000 just 12 months later, and its civil rights movement, which inspired a white New Left datable to SDS’s 1962 Port Huron Statement and in 1966 amalgamated the lessons of 1965’s Selma march, the Civil Rights Act, and the Watts rebellion into one controversial, irresistible slogan: Black Power.

Backtracking to clarify and condensing for speed, Savage squeezes these upheavals and many more into his 547 pages by keying a month-titled chapter to each. May extols both a women’s movement sparked by Casey Hayden and Mary King’s 1966 critique of SDS’s gender-based “caste system” and the Supremes and Dusty Springfield; stretching a little, August links a barely nascent gay rights movement to doomed U.K. producer Joe Meek. Usually, however, chapter themes are less explicitly political: youth ideology, lysergic mind expansion, Warhol’s Factory, the onset of “soul,” riots on Sunset Strip, and the mad ferment, brave experiments, and silly pretensions of “rock.” There’s a crucial and perhaps underplayed moment midway in, when Prime Minister Harold Wilson imposes wage and price freezes on a British economy that stalled years before America’s did, sealing Swinging London’s decline into last year’s brand. As the year slows to a close, the Beatles are rumored to be recording an album that will change everything. Next year’s brand: the Summer of Love.

Without undertaking the impossible task of folding all this action into a neat narrative, Savage constructs his mosaic efficiently. And always he keeps one eye and both ears on the music. In this his wide range is no less remarkable than his sense of thematic relevance. By picking and choosing — although he’s scrupulous about noting the wild cards the pop charts always put on the table — he illustrates his evolving theses with classics and finds, number ones shrouded in memory and minor hits you missed and flops you never heard of. On the Brit side are brief portraits of not just Beatles-Stones-Who but Yardbirds–Kinks–Small Faces, on the Yank side deep readings of “Eight Miles High” and “Good Vibrations” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (as well as Norma Tanega’s “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog,” a touchstone I’d long believed lost to history). There’s a pained yet comedic minor R&B hit about the draft and a foreshortened James Brown B-side so frantic Savage can’t resist claiming that it “completely deconstructed black music.” There are smitten accounts of Wilson Pickett‘s “Land of 1000 Dances” and the Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There.”

Scanning these passages again, I was struck by how nostalgic just the raw titles made me — recalling the music sparked an affection and awe that recalling the history did not. I knew this was just art transmuting truth into beauty and pop putting a happy face on “96 Tears” and “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.” But to get a better bead on it I played and replayed Jon Savage’s 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded, the double-CD he put together for Ace Records to accompany his tome. Soon I found that it sounded even better than it had when I reviewed it back in January. Turns out Savage was righter than I’d thought about arcana from the Ugly’s prophetic, anti-hegemonic opener “The Quiet Explosion” (all that in 2:40, really!) or the Human Expression’s freaked-out speed trip “Love at Psychedelic Velocity” (“We were basically trying to attract attention,” Savage was told). And with the music on my mind I began to wonder about something that hadn’t occurred to me as I read. No matter how “objectively” accounted for, history is always individual for each person experiencing it. What was tweenage Jon doing all this time? How many of these tunes did he relish as a record nerd a-borning?

Having traversed unreasonable elation and tumultuous rage, giddy hope and thwarted potential, Savage ends his big year fraught and exhausted — on his final musical selection, a fragile Tim Hardin wonders, “How can we hang on to a dream?” In Britain, maybe this was how it was. But in America, I don’t think so, because subtending what Otis Redding had yet to dub “the love generation” was a material base that, as Savage notes, was already shrinking in Wilson’s U.K. — two decades of rising prosperity with three years to go. And for me personally I know this wasn’t how it was, because 1966 was when I fell in love and found my lifework, while Savage — and here I’m compelled to guess — was a fresh-minted teenager trying to figure out who he was, a struggle I’d guess once again came to some sort of resolution in punk 1977. How his own life evolved in tandem with his nation’s during the 11 intervening years is something I’d love to learn more about.

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We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man. Were this done, and a slight temporary fermentation allowed to subside, we believe that the Divine would ascend into nature to a height unknown in the history of past ages, and nature, thus instructed, would regulate the spheres not only so as to avoid collision, but to bring forth ravishing harmony . . .

The American activist and journalist Margaret Fuller began to serialize “The Great Lawsuit,” excerpted above, in the July 1843 issue of The Dial, the journal of Transcendentalism she edited. Published in 1845 as Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller’s impassioned argument for gender equality is regarded as a seminal text for American feminism and the cornerstone of her legacy. “I had put a good deal of my true self in it,” she later wrote a friend, “as if, I suppose I went away now, the measure of my footprint would be left on earth.” Five years later, on July 19, 1850, Fuller, her husband, and her infant son drowned when their storm-tossed boat ran aground just off Fire Island, New York.

Fuller’s pioneering and fervent personality put her in the spotlight throughout her life, but her last years, spent in Rome supporting the short-lived Roman Republic, reached an operatic level of passion and poignancy. In her dispatches for the New York Tribune — she was the newspaper’s first female foreign correspondent — Fuller argued the cause of the Italian revolutionists, one of whom she had married.

With the ramparts fallen and her husband at risk for his politics, Fuller had set aside her premonitions of disaster (and warnings from Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Concord friends that her socialist leanings and out-of-wedlock son would provoke public disfavor) and sailed for home.

Emerson sent Thoreau to Fire Island to help look for Fuller’s body and for any personal belongings he might find. In the historical record, Thoreau came back empty-handed; in April Bernard’s novel Miss Fuller, he returns with a letter-journal, addressed to Sophia Peabody Hawthorne. Part biography and part manifesto, Fuller’s letter ranges across her unconventional life and provocative thoughts. As Thoreau’s younger sister Anne (imagined for the novel) peruses the document, she begins her own voyage toward understanding why Fuller’s life was so provocative, and her death almost welcomed:

Everyone was — relieved. Not actually glad that she was dead, perhaps. But surely relieved, relieved of the burden of this impossible woman. Relieved that they no longer would have to read her exhortations to do good, to send money, to think more broadly, to consider the poor and the powerless, to worry over their place in history, to follow her difficult sentences, to wonder if women after all should be allowed to pester them in this way, and to do such things as Miss Fuller did and imagined.

She made everybody angry. Such a terrible talent.

”I neither rejoice nor grieve,” Fuller says in one of her late letters from Rome, “for bad or good I acted out my character.” This insistence on self-realization, says Megan Marshall in her Pulitzer-winning Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, may be the most indelible principle of her message-in-a-bottle to the modern world:

In a time when “self-reliance” was the watchword — one she helped to coin and circulate — Margaret had, by her own account, a “mind that insisted on utterance.” She insisted that her ideas be valued as highly as those of the brilliant men who were her comrades. She refused to be pigeonholed as a woman writer or trivialized as sentimental, and her interests were as far-ranging as the country itself, where, as she wrote in a farewell column for the Tribune when she sailed for Europe, “life rushes wild and free.”

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By law, a slave was three-fifths of a person. It came to me that what I’d just suggested would seem paramount to proclaiming vegetables equal to animals, animals equal to humans, women equal to men, men equal to angels. I was upending the order of creation . . .

“My goodness, did you learn this from the Presbyterians?” Father asked. “Are they saying slaves should live among us as equals?” The question was sarcastic, meant for my brothers and for the moment itself, yet I answered him.

“No, Father, I’m saying it.”

—from The Invention of Wings, Sue Monk Kidd’s novel about the life of the nineteenth-century abolitionist-activist Sarah Moore Grimké

The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified on July 28, 1868, when three-fourths of the states (twenty-eight of thirty-seven) accepted what would become some of the most important and frequently litigated constitutional measures, among them the citizenship, due process, and equal protection clauses. Ratification represented the triumph of the principles espoused by the abolitionist movement, in which Sarah Grimké and her sister, Angelina, were among the earliest and most ardent campaigners, advocating not only emancipation but equality.

The Grimké sisters came from a Southern slave-holding family, which they defied. In Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, Henry Wiencek tries to make sense of the man who declared the nation built upon the self-evident truth of equality but, conforming to his heritage and his class, built his Virginia plantations and his wider prosperity upon “the execrable commerce” of slavery. Wiencek notes that while the younger, abolitionist Jefferson wished to take the ancient Roman dictum “Let there be justice, even if the sky falls” as his guiding principle, his personal documents reflect “a turmoil of doubts, loathings, self-recrimination, all vying with the imperative to create a productive plantation”:

The pages of Jefferson’s notebook offer a diorama of the young man’s psyche — the architect and planter struggling against the moralist, seeking a way to absorb this foul, repugnant system into his interior landscape and into the exterior landscape he is shaping.

Jefferson’s first public proposal against slavery was through an emancipation bill he proposed to Virginia’s House of Burgesses (boroughs). The first legislative assembly in the New World, the House of Burgesses is also tied to this week, its first session held on July 30, 1619. While its endorsement of the “one man one vote” principle was compromised — at first enfranchising only free men, then only landowning men, and of course no women — the House of Burgesses reflected a commitment to consensus and to community. Now 450 years onward, says Yuval Levin in The Fractured Republic, the nation must somehow renew that commitment, thereby overcoming the yawning liberal-conservative divide. This cannot be accomplished through a nostalgic recreation of some earlier stage of American greatness but by exploring how the foundational principles “could be applied to our novel, twenty-first-century circumstances — to build upon our dynamism and diversity while combatting the aimlessness, isolation, social breakdown, and stunted opportunities that now stand in the way of too many Americans.”

For Levin, “a politics of subsidiarity” offers a way forward. In principle, “Subsidiarity means that no one gets to have their way exclusively,” that freedom is “a social achievement,” and that the only way to mend the national fracture is “not by denying our differences, but by rising above them when we are called.” In practice, subsidiarity means empowering the “middle layers of society” — the contemporary boroughs, in which reside “the institutions of family, community, local authority, and civic action”:

The middle layers of society, where people see each other face to face, offer a middle ground between radical individualism and extreme centralization. Our political life need not consist of a recurring choice between having the federal government invade and occupy the middle layers of society or having isolated individuals break down the institutions that compose those layers. It can and should be an arena for attempting different ways of empowering those middle institutions to help our society confront its problems.

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Picture this: “The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are washed up. And there was so much motion in it: the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.” And now this: “A hard rind of shimmering dirt and grass. The wind scours it constantly, scrubbing the sage and sweeping out all the deserted buildings and weathered homes . . . Flat as hell’s basement and empty as the boundless sky above it.” The first image is from Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, published in 1918, the second from Bonnie Nadzam’s new novel, Lions. Both stories are rooted in similar earth — and Nadzam declares herself “particularly indebted” to Cather — yet the landscapes portrayed could not be more different. Whereas Cather’s wind-caressed Nebraska prairie moves ” . . . as if the shaggy grass were a loose sort of hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping . . . , ” Nadzam’s present-day Colorado plain is a desiccated wasteland. The place name itself was surely “meant to stand in for disappointment,” no lions having existed there. “I can’t remember ever seeing this town anything other than empty, ” an old-timer tells his drinking companions. ” ‘The past was great, they said. The future will be great, they said . . . None of it was true.’ They all grew quiet. Everything was heavy. Their beer glasses. The boots at the ends of their feet.”

Even with the “mute television hanging over the bar” and the nearby interstate roaring past, the residents of Lions might be mistaken for peasants in an ancient fairy tale: immobilized, entranced. “Everyone old, everyone poor, everyone white,” one character observes. Except for pretty Leigh Ransom and handsome Gordon Walker, in love and leaving soon for college. But can they leave? When Walker men have for generations been bound to this land — and pledged to serve one of its ghosts? For Lions is a ghost-ridden place set down on ancient, blood-soaked terrain. Nadzam describes it, however, with such cinematic clarity that each element, whether real or spectral, seems tangible: the brooding stranger at the door, the diner sandwich on the grill.

The mystery begins, of course, with the stranger. “It was just barely twilight. The man stooped and scratched the dog behind the ears and spoke to her, looking out over what he could see of the town . . . the small crush of lights in the distance from the diner and the bar where anyone still surviving had gathered to ride out the coming night.” At the Walker house he is welcomed as though expected, fed, freshly clothed, and given provisions for the road. He visits the bar, spends the night in jail, and the next day finds his dog dead on the highway. “A huge dry storm rotated overhead that evening,” Nadzam writes with biblical gusto, “howling like loose trains and beating the naked plain back to life.” Before long, a human corpse turns up in the town’s water tower, and Gordon Walker has headed northward on a cryptic mission, ” . . . a band of darkness slowly closing over him like a lid.”

As the atmosphere thickens with a few portents too many, Nadzam wisely shifts our attention to restless Leigh Ransom, a lively spark in the gloom and the novel’s most substantial character. Helping out in her mother’s diner and impatient to leave, she studies the occasional fresh customer, ” . . . bitter that others had what looked to her like a better life. Their easy smiles, their confidence.” Then along comes Alan Ranger, a slick Denver businessman, whose arrival perks up both Leigh and the somnolent narrative. “He drove a forest green pickup, his golden arm hanging out the window. He smiled, and she leaned in at the rolled-down window. There was a six-pack of cold brown bottles in the passenger seat.” The diversion is brief — a few beers, a few kisses, the zing of maybe — yet in it Nadzam, at her plain best, conveys both the reckless certainty of youth and its accompanying lurch of dread. (A feeling palpable throughout Nadzam’s first novel, Lamb, whose theme notoriously recalled Nabokov’s Lolita.) Leigh will leave. But escaping your place, she eventually learns, is easier than escaping the past; there is simply too much of the latter on this brooding frontier. Even Nadzam, the creator, has nowhere to go at the novel’s conclusion but back to the land where a centuries-old legend still holds sway over puny mortal desires.

“She’ll drive north, alone,” Nadzam writes of Leigh’s inevitable return, years later, “higher and higher, as she searches for a tall narrow hut. She’ll look for the white circle of a man’s face flashing like a light among the trees. She’ll look for a blue feather of chimney smoke.” In this evocative yet frustrating novel, the reader too is left searching for the meaning of it all.

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It is hard to believe Miroslav Penkov is younger than I am, born in 1982, when the experience of reading him is akin to reading the authors of Western classics. I have the simultaneous feeling of being deeply immersed in the pleasures of the work and also enjoying that I am learning quite a lot — this combination almost never happens for me with contemporary authors. But not only is he somewhat new to this; he is also somewhat new to English. It is something to realize Bulgarian-born Penkov has only been in America fifteen years — he moved here from Sofia to study in Arkansas, of all places (he is now a professor in Texas). His first book was a collection of stories, East of the West (2012), and many of the stories can be found in A Public Space, Granta, One Story, Orion, The Sunday Times, The Best American Short Stories 2008, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013. Since then he’s also won many awards and honors, from the BBC International Short Story Award 2012 and The Southern Review‘s Eudora Welty Prize to a fellowship with the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.

His eagerly awaited debut novel, Stork Mountain, came out this past spring from FSG. It has been called everything from “the Great Bulgarian Novel” by Steven G. Kellman in the Dallas Morning News to “a Bulgarian Don Quixote” by Rabih Alameddine. It is a gorgeous, ambitious, sprawling, multi-dimensional baroque tale of going back to one’s ancestral home — in this case a Bulgarian-American man looking for his grandfather, who has gone missing. The political and the mystical, the historical and the spiritual, all intertwine in unexpected ways, as coming-of-age meets love story in this stunning debut. Penkov writes his books in both English and Bulgarian — he reluctantly has become the Bulgarian translator of his own work, as he prefers to compose in English. Coming-of-age tropes, hyphenated identities, the quest to find one’s homeland, ancient myths and ancestral rituals are all preoccupations of both my own novels, so it made sense that I would love Stork Mountain, and I had the great pleasure of emailing with Penkov over the course of many months this past spring. — Porochista Khakpour

The Barnes & Noble Review: Can you talk about where this idea for Stork Mountain began?

Miroslav Penkov: I wrote Stork Mountain half a world away from Bulgaria, in the plains of Texas, where I live now. The land is flat here, the sky is enormous, and the only mountains you see are those imagined in the shapes of storm clouds gathering on the horizon. Maybe that’s why there is so much Bulgaria in this book: places and people for which my heart felt a painful longing. Maybe writing these pages was my way of erasing the distance, of returning home at least in spirit if not in body. But Stork Mountain is not a novel of nostalgia or homesickness. It is a novel of transformation, an alchemical novel whose characters embark on their own adventure, descend into darkness, pass through fire so they may be purified and born again. And like Dionysus, a god once revered there in the Stork Mountain, this novel too was twice-born: I wrote it first in English, a language I didn’t really begin to study until I was fourteen, and then again, in Bulgarian, my mother tongue.

I think I was seven when I first saw fire dancers, a tourist attraction on the Black Sea. Men and women, beautiful in their traditional costumes, dancing across live coals, barefoot, carrying in their arms large wooden icons. The mystery of their dance never left me. Why didn’t they get burned? What did it mean to enter the fire and then walk out unscathed?

It was this memory, of the women barefoot in the glowing coals, that returned to me many years later. Here was an image powerful enough to anchor my novel, to hold together its characters, places, and stories.

But there was a problem: I knew nothing of this fire dancing. How long ago did it all start? In what land? And was it still practiced today, not as a tourist attraction but in earnest? For the Persians, I learned, fire had been a sacred thing. Their Wise Lord, Ahura Mazda, had spoken to Zoroaster through flame, and it was this fire veneration that had somehow made its way to the Balkans. Then there was Eleusis, where every year for centuries on end the ancients gathered to perform the most secret rites of Greece, a rave unrivaled ever since, all in the name of Demeter and her daughter Persephone.

And then there were the maenads, the raving ones, the crazy priestesses of Dionysus who drank their doctored wine and danced madly, frantically in honor of their god; and who, in their exhilaration, tore to pieces sacrificial goats and even men foolish enough to trespass on their holy ground. The great singer Orpheus himself fell victim to these maenads, his wretched head floating down the Helikon River.

The more I read, the brighter one place burned: the Strandja Mountains, a range on the border between Bulgaria and Turkey, not far from Greece. That was where Orpheus had roamed. That was where the maenads had danced, where the cult of Dionysus had been most widespread — and where, today, the fire dancers, the nestinari, still walked in burning coals.

And this is how I found my place, a place of beauty and of sadness. Burned in countless wars, a theater of massacres and mass migrations. The Russo-Turkish Wars. The Balkan Wars of 1913. The Ottoman armies retreating left nothing but death. Ethnic cleansings of Bulgarians, Armenians, and Greeks. The more I read, the clearer I saw: the Strandja was herself a fire dancer. For centuries on end, time and again, the mountain had passed through fire, had been reduced to ash only to rise reborn.

Finally there were the storks. Each year, on their way back from Africa, 85 percent of all European white storks fly over the Strandja Mountains. Their babies hatch in Europe, get strong, and then in August the flocks fly back, once more over the Strandja. What would it be like, I wondered from my home in Texas, to look out the window and see thousands of migrating storks, trees heavy with their nests? What would it be like to cross not flat fields but an ancient mountain that holds in its bosom ancient secrets that only fire can release?

The more I read about the place, its mysteries and times, the more I ached to write. So what if I had never visited the Strandja? So what if I was far away from Bulgaria, here in Texas? I began to imagine wildly, to conjure up strange and enchanting places — a giant tree heavy with stork nests; human skulls buried in the nests; and the main characters climbing up the tree, hiding in the nest, their safe place. I imagined crossing the border into Turkey to discover old Thracian ruins up in the hills; I imagined a place where a river flows into the Black Sea. And before I knew it I’d written half the book.

Fear set in, naturally — what if I was wrong? What if all that I had thought of simply couldn’t be? Sick with dread, I flew to Bulgaria. I drove to the Strandja Mountains and watched the fire dancers walk in burning coals, and I roamed the hills and met their people. They were all there — the giant trees, the ancient ruins — as if somehow I had wished them into existence. What a beautiful feeling that was, what an eerie feeling, to see with my eyes for the first time that which my heart had always known.

BNR: Did you worry about what it might be like to bring these worlds to our world today? The anxiety of the political upon the personal, perhaps? I want to always say I am bigger than these concerns as an author, but I am far from it!

MP: There is a piece of advice I’ve learned from my father, something my great-grandfather had once told him: two things in life you should never mess with — electricity and politics. Unless you know exactly what you’re doing, they’ll both hit you with a deadly force.

I adore Chekhov and appreciate (as he called it in one letter to his brother) the “absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature” in his writing. I think politics, or too much of it, can poison the heart of a story. But at the same time, the stories I’ve wanted to write in the past fifteen years, the human beings about whom I’ve wanted to speak, have almost always been critically branded by history and politics. So that even when I’ve aimed to put character to the forefront, politics has always managed to rear its noxious head.

I didn’t want to write about the love between a Christian and a Muslim. Although, funnily enough, when the novel came out in Bulgaria a couple of months ago, one newspaper wrote exactly this as a title: Miroslav Penkov Describes What It Is Like to Be In Love with a Muslim. Instead, what I wanted to write about was the love between a young man who’s returned home after years in America and a young woman at odds with the world; a girl who struggles to escape her village, her father, and above all — herself.

But you can’t treat these characters as real human beings unless you position them accurately in the context of time and place. And so the boy becomes an immigrant scarred by the fall of Communism, hurt by a life of loneliness abroad, while the girl, hurt by that same Communist regime, is suddenly the victim of a zealous father, of a backward and superstitious culture, of the extreme application of her Muslim faith.

BNR: Can you talk about the differences between your audience abroad in Europe versus here in America?

MP: Even though my story collection East of the West was published in a dozen European countries, I have very little understanding of what my European audience is like. I simply don’t know Western Europe, because I grew up in the days of visas and austere borders and never got the chance to travel. And now that Bulgaria is part of the European Union and travel is unimpeded, it’s the lack of free time that proves the biggest obstacle. But I do think about the difference between my readers in Bulgaria and those everywhere else. Writing simultaneously in two languages — English and Bulgarian — has always put me in a difficult spot. Who is Stork Mountain really meant for? Western readers who are not intimately familiar with Bulgarian culture and history and for whom certain historical and cultural elements should be streamlined and simplified? Or readers in Bulgaria who would be supremely annoyed by too much simplification and streamlining? I don’t know how to deal with this issue other than to write for one ideal, imaginary reader — someone who knows close to nothing about Bulgaria yet is not afraid to wade out deep into its history and myth; who is not easily frightened by the politics of an unaccustomed region but is curious, hungry, and excited to learn; a traveler who understands that it is the journey that matters, the winding path with a heart, and not necessarily the straight, easy line that leads us quickly to the final destination.

BNR: Sometimes I find the English language cripples me so much when I want to write about the global or even the two sides of my hyphenated identity. What do you think about writing in English? Do you think about it?

MP: The greatest treasure in my life — aside from the people I love — is my ability to read in two languages. Bulgarian affords me a natural access to all Slavic literature, English to the literature of the rest of the world. There are writers I would have never read — and I don’t mean just Shakespeare or Carver — but writers like Borges, or Kawabata, who have never been translated into Bulgarian or translated well.
As a writer, my greatest treasure in the privilege to write in two languages. Not only doesn’t English cripple me, it simultaneously liberates and keeps me in check. In Bulgarian my prose is wild and turbulent like a river, because in Bulgarian I am often intoxicated by sounds and rhythms. My English, on the other hand, because I didn’t begin to study it seriously until I was fourteen, is much sparer, much more limited. But contrary to expectation, this austerity of prose proves to be a great blessing. Writing in English forces me to strive for clarity, for elegance; it prevents me from getting too tangled in sentences at the expense of characters and story.
Of course there are individual words, material objects that don’t exist outside of our Balkan world, outside of our Balkan languages. Like nestinari¸ for example, the fire dancers of Stork Mountain. And if I were a translator I would have felt limited and oppressed, trying to find accurate English equivalents for these words. But I’m not a translator. I just happen to sing the same song in two different voices. My aim is not to translate individual words but to carry over specific states of mind and spirit. My aim is to write in such a way that regardless of language and nationality the reader will be able to feel with her heart the place, the characters, the story.

BNR: Communism and the War on Terror have been huge American obsessions of the last decade — you can argue Islam has replaced Communism as the bogeyman. Do you feel this way at all?

MP: I’m afraid this issue is too complicated to discuss in a couple hundred words. I write this now mere hours after yet another bloody terrorist attack in Turkey. Radical Islam is the scourge of our times. I can’t imagine anyone disputing this painful truth. The people who practice it are easy to fear and easy to hate. In much the same fashion, they hate and fear us with ease. And in nefarious hands such fear and hatred are easily exploited.     I believe that there is in all of us a dark, primal force that strives for divisions. It works tirelessly to pull us out of the whole, to break the world around us into pieces that it urges us to claim, possess, and control. This is my house, my car, my wife. This is my tribe, my country. To this dark force, “the other” is always terrifying, menacing, unknown. “The other” must be feared and either subjugated or destroyed. I believe fiction has the power to counteract this divisive force. I believe fiction evokes empathy, dissolves borders, tames the ego, and ultimately erases the concept of “the other.” Fiction has the power to return us, if only for a short while, to the source, to our greater human collective.

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A lonely teenage girl, her last summer at home before boarding school, an intriguing gang of older, louche girls in a local park. It’s northern California at the end of the 1960s, and these girls are coming of age at the edge of unspeakable violence. Written in seductive, luminous prose, Emma Cline’s haunting novel, The Girls, captures the experience of crossing between adolescence and adulthood, questioning what we’re willing to do to belong and to be seen.

The reviews continue to land, and they are all phenomenal. “Arresting,” “stunning,” “mesmerizing and sympathetic” — and that’s just a start. They continue: “An astonishing work of imagination, “remarkably atmospheric, preternaturally intelligent, and brutally feminist,” “a wise novel that’s never showy,” “a quiet, seething confession of yearning and terror.”

A few weeks ago Emma Cline and her editor, Kate Medina, executive vice president, associate publisher, executive editorial director at Random House, took the stage at Barnes & Noble on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to talk about the genesis of this remarkable novel. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. —Miwa Messer

 

Kate Medina: One of the things I found remarkable about your book, as you know, is your profound understanding of adolescent girls and of the women they become. I remember asking you when you came in to see me, “How do you know so much about girls?” How do you?

Emma Cline: Well, there’s one easy, obvious answer — that I was a girl. But then, I also have four younger sisters, which is quite a lot of adolescents to be in one house together, as I’m sure my mother would agree. So there’s five girls in my family, as well as two boys, and all five of us are very close in age. It was really one right after the other. So just five teenage girls in one house, which is like an illness in the household. You should stay away. There should be a sign over the door.

You experience something as an adolescent girl, and maybe it doesn’t imprint on you, but you see it repeated four times in quick succession, and you start to see patterns and sort of think about the way that girls and women are treated in the world.

KM: That’s one really strong draw, I think, to this novel. In the New York Times feature about you, Emma, you spoke about driving past Charles Manson’s house as a child. Would you tell us about your background and how it inspired this novel.

EC: That was a huge part of why I came to this story. I’m from California, northern California, which is still very haunted by the ’60s. They’re still sort of dealing with the leftovers of this era, which was so important. So I sort of grew up in the shadow of it. Yeah, we would drive past San Quentin, which is a prison, when I was little, when I was six or seven, and my parents would say, “That’s Charles Manson’s house.” And in the way of little kids, I really thought he lived there. I thought that’s an awfully big house, but I was also really scared of him. He was sort of my version of the Bogeyman growing up.

Then, as I got older, I read Helter Skelter. That was the first thing I read about the Manson Family. Which I think a lot of teenagers sort of find magnetically somehow; they’re just drawn to this tawdry true-crime book. I read that, and I remember being so fascinated that the women involved, the girls were really only a few years older than I was at the time when I first read it. That’s who I was interested in, in the story. I wasn’t so interested in Manson, who I think we all know quite a bit about at this time, and I don’t know that there’s much new information that has a lot of texture. But to me, the girls . . . there was some space left over for a novelist.

KM: I think that is what we’re finding many readers relate to is your understanding of the powerful longing in girls to be seen, acknowledged, and belong. One of the messages we get on Facebook a lot about this book is: What would you do to belong? I think about this aspect of the girls in your novel when I read about ISIS, young women called “brides of ISIS” who leave Canada, the United Kingdom, and other places, vulnerable to falling into that kind of attachment. I’m wondering if you’d say more about that kind of vulnerable time in a girl’s life.

EC: Yes — this book is set mostly in the ’60s, but to me there is something about the story that really could happen at any moment, and, like you’re saying, the teenage girls who sort of ran away to join ISIS — it’s not something that was only specific to 1969. I think the desire to belong and be part of something larger, and to really be seen and noticed, is such a primal desire and won’t ever really go away. I think that’s what animates a lot of the book. The cult aspect is interesting to me, but it’s a way of talking about what I’m really interested in, which is the lives of girls and that yearning, and how does the world treat that yearning — how do they take advantage of it?

I think it’s also an age when young women are testing the boundaries of the world around them. I think we teach young women that the world is dangerous for them specifically. So if you’ve been raised that way, how do you find your way in the world? Could you maybe want to seek out danger? Because that’s a way of figuring out how will the world treat you. That’s a moment where you have excitement or power over your own life in a world that often leaves you powerless.

KM: Some other reviewers have focused on the Mansonesque aspects of Russell, who is the charismatic center of the cult. And other books have been written about California’s dark side and the male leaders, with women as bit players, I think you once said. But you wanted to write about the girls. Would you say a little more about that, and why you made girls the center of the story?

EC: Yeah. Like I said, and as you’ve mentioned, we almost have this interchangeable idea of what a cult leader looks like, and a lot of them came out of northern California. Go, California! Gerald Stone, Jim Jones, Manson . . . In many ways, they are very similar. I think we’re familiar with the psychological profile of these people. I think in this book I really like that Russell is actually the side character. In a book that people might call, like, a Manson Book or a Mansonesque book, I really like the idea of sort of putting that meat to the side. It’s been funny. It’s mostly been men, but they’ve been like, Why not more about this fascinating Russell character?

But to me, yeah, I love that his orbit around these women, actually, is in many ways incidental to the plot.

KM: It’s also very interesting in this novel how Evie gradually begins to see who he really is. It’s very sophisticated and very marvelous, how you do that.

EC: I think an older reader can see right away that he’s not anything very special, but to a fourteen-year-old girl, somebody who is sort of saying the things they want to hear — but I also love that the reason Evie really gets interested in the group is because of Suzanne, an older girl, and not because of this man, that it’s really like this projection and this intense friendship that acts as the incident that sort of gets her involved.

KM: I remember wanting to read your novel fast, to find out what was going to happen, and slow, to savor the words and the writing. I guess if a writer can ever say: How did you learn to write like this? You have an MFA from Columbia. What did you learn about writing there, and how did you develop this amazing voice?

EC: I think as a reader, I’ve always been drawn to books that create their own world, and that sort of are very immersive, and you learn how to read them as you go on. So I loved the idea of this book that functions as its own visual universe almost. I was thinking of other books that I really enjoyed. I think The Virgin Suicides is one that you immediately are sort of indoctrinated almost into this writer’s tone and style. And Lorrie Moore, too. Other writers who sort of work at a heightened pitch, I think. That was important to me.

It mostly comes from reading so much and really thinking about what I enjoy as a reader. Which is also what was great about going to an MFA program. Because you’re forced to confront the fact of readers, and if you’re working alone, you can sort of project all kinds of things onto your own work that may or may not be there. But readers will tell you. So that was important to me, to respect the reading experience when I read this book.

KM: So it was workshopped?

EC: I actually never really workshopped this novel. I was mostly workshopping short stories, just because the structure of an MFA doesn’t really lend itself to workshopping novels. So really my main reader while I was writing this book was one of my four younger sisters. It turns out you can make your younger sister read twelve drafts of a book! So she was my proto-editor. And I sort of bribed her with many treats, but she read my drafts. And in many ways, she’s sort of my ideal reader, I think. So she told me when I was going in the right direction.

KM: Did your understanding of girls and women evolve or deepen as you wrote your way through this book or as you heard people talk about the book and respond to it? I guess I wondered whether the writing of the book and the publishing of the book affected the way you think about girls and women. Was there any change that you remember noticing?

EC: For me, it’s been really gratifying hearing that the book has been meaningful to people, especially young women, but also anyone who has been a young woman or knows a young woman. What I wanted to do in writing the book was, I think, present a complex portrait of girls and sort of let them be more than the one-note characterizations that I think are so prevalent in the way that we talk about teenage girls especially. I think we have very flat characterizations of them and give them so little subjectivity and agency. So writing a book with these girls at the center who are allowed to be more than victims — sometimes they are people who victimize other people. Or something terrible can happen, and they might almost like it. They have all these complex feelings, which I think is real to how girls and women experience the world.

I know for me, as a big reader, it’s rare to come across this. I remember one of the first times I really did. I don’t know if any of have you read Diary of a Teenage Girl or seen the movie, which was also great. But my heart started pounding a little faster when I was reading, because I just thought, Oh, here it is. That’s something I really wanted to do with this book, too.

KM: A lot of the messaging online in praise of the girls has to do with what’s called the “near miss” in a girl or a woman’s life, that moment when everything could go horribly wrong. Were you aware of this kind of common or universal possible connection that people would be making to this book?

EC: Yes. And I’ve definitely heard a lot more stories as the book has been out in the world. But I think it’s something that was true with most of the women I know. Just that they experienced girlhood as this very dangerous moment, and that they were sort of going right up to the edge of things all the time, that sort of way of testing boundaries, and they felt that it was almost an accident that nothing bad happened, or that nothing worse happened. I think a lot of that points to the way that we treat women and girls and the way our society is structured — that it’s such a vulnerable population.

KM: There is in the book some commentary about the stereotypes out there of women, with which you’re at odds. So Evie identifies common female stereotypes by saying, “That was part of being a girl. You were resigned to whatever feedback you get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn’t react, you were a bitch.” That encapsulates many of the sentiments about female adolescence throughout the book. Would you want to speak about that line?

EC: Sure. It’s grim to hear it repeated back, because I think it’s somewhat true that we do give girls this tiny little real estate to sort of exist in, when, of course, they are full human beings. And can you write a book that gives them back their full humanity? Yeah.

KM: One of the things that I admired about this book is that you let us see all the people of different ages in this book as real people. Particularly your portrayal of Evie’s mother and father, who really do kind of drop the ball and leave her on her own this summer, and also to Mara, her father’s girlfriend, in that you make them real people. They are not all bad or all good. They are just people. So it’s a surprise, and one of the many surprises in this book, who comes through for Evie. Tell me how you feel, for example, about Evie’s mother. I found her quite sympathetic, trying in the ’60s way to put her life together again after a divorce.

EC: It was really important to me that no one be 100 percent bad or good, because again, I don’t think that’s how the world operates. I think it’s actually what’s most frightening about something . . . you know, a crime like there is at the center of this book, is that it’s often committed by people who you can see their humanity at the same time that you can see this horror. And what does it mean to be able to see both of those things, and have you make sense of it? Or can you even make sense? The parents don’t commit any terrible crimes, but to the teenage Evie, I think she really experiences then not as monsters but as people who are just letting her down so brutally.

But that’s what’s nice about having an older narrator — you get to comment and contextualize on this almost suffocating point of view that is like a fourteen-year-old girl’s point of view. I feel like when you’re a teenager, you can’t really accept nuance or gray area. You have this real purity almost in your commitment to your ideals or the sense that the world is very black-and-white. The definition of adulthood is compromise and nuance, the gray area. That’s the realm of being an adult, unfortunately.

KM: Can you love someone who has done something terrible? How would you answer that question?

EC: I think that’s a lot of what the book is about, that Evie has had this intense relationship with Suzanne, the older girl who draws her into this group, and she is still struggling with this many decades later, to form some narrative about what it meant or who Suzanne was to her. They might be able to meet again as adults, and you might be able to get some resolution about this person who resists any kind of easy reading. But I like the idea that in this book she never gets that closure. That felt very true to life to me, that these people can come and have a huge impact on you, and maybe for the rest of your life you would be trying to come up with a story to tell yourself about what that meant.

KM: One of the things I love most about this novel is that in roughly the last half of the book, many things happen that are not actually explained. So with some of the turning points at the end of the novel, you have to kind of figure out what you think happened. How did you manage to resist telling us what happened?

EC: I think, honestly, the character doesn’t quite know, so that’s easier to sort of occupy as the writer, too — that not-knowing. But also, that’s what I’m most interested in in art and fiction especially, is these ambiguous moments. For me, I was thinking a lot about sort of moral luck with this book. One of the examples that’s most used is, like: Is somebody who drives drunk but doesn’t kill anyone as culpable as someone who drives drunk and happens to get in a car accident where someone dies? The accident of the way our lives turn out. And also, what would it mean to you if you could feel your proximity to something so terrible and sort of never know what your culpability, your moral responsibility really was in that moment? That to me seems a rich well to draw from for fiction.

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Detective Sergeant Manon Bradshaw of Susie Steiner’s Missing, Presumed is thirty-nine years old, single, and doggedly seeking love. The last is not her defining characteristic, but it is her most unfortunate one. (“Two years of Internet dating. It’s fair to say they haven’t flown by.”) When we meet her, she is enduring dinner at a restaurant with a man “whose name might be Brian but equally be Keith.” By any name he is a bore and a prig, his outstanding features being his interest in the details of his own job and his extreme punctiliousness in dividing the bill: He did not, he points out, have any wine. To those of us who are gobblers of British crime novels, Manon is a familiar type, built along the lines of Ian Rankin‘s Siobhan Clarke and Kate Atkinson‘s Tracy Waterhouse: bad diet, regrettable clothes, stubborn, perceptive, clear-headed, and hardnosed with a well-concealed heart. More particularly, Manon is a member of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, and the case that brings her to our notice, in this the first volume of what is projected to be a series, is that of a missing woman.

Returning one Sunday night to the little worker’s cottage he shares with his girlfriend, Edith Hind, Will Carter finds the door open and the lights on. Edith’s phone, keys, and car are there, and also some spatters of blood — but no Edith. He calls the police, and matters quickly become of the highest priority when it turns out that the missing woman, a graduate student at Cambridge University, is the daughter of Sir Ian Hind and his wife, Miriam. Sir Ian is a surgeon, among whose patients are members of the royal family. Beyond that, he is great friends with the home secretary and not at all reluctant to throw his weight around. “From now on,” Manon’s superior officer tells her sardonically, “we treat Sir Bufton Tufton downstairs with the utterly slavish deference he so richly deserves.”

As the investigation proceeds, a picture of Edith begins to emerge, and the more we learn about her, the more tiresome she strikes us as being. A harsh critic of the modern world, a would-be savior of the planet, and an advocate of “living truthfully,” she is supported by her parents with a handsome monthly allowance. She refuses to have a bank account, declaring that “someone has to break with the status quo,” and is in favor of banning cars — though she has an electric one herself. In the course of questioning Edith’s friends and acquaintances, the police learn that she has treated a close friend, Helena, with sarcastic contempt, then initiated a sexual relationship with her, leaving the other woman confused, ashamed, and yearning. Not content with that, she boasted of the affair. Soon enough, the media learn of the matter, reporting it with lurid extravagance. The consequence is disastrous.

Additional strands weave their way in: A notorious sexual predator seems to have had some sort of contact with Edith and, more dramatically, the drowned body of a young man, a petty criminal, is discovered in the nearby River Ouse. Is there a connection? Does the dead man’s younger brother, whom he looked after, hold a clue? And what will become of this child now that his brother is gone?

The story is told from three main points of view, with glimpses from a couple of others. Manon’s dominates, followed by that of Edith’s mother, Miriam, a trained physician who has wound up giving over much of her life to being a wife and a mother to two children. We also see matters as Detective Constable Davy Walker sees them. He is a cheerful, compassionate young man who works with troubled children in his off hours. His girlfriend, Chloe, on the other hand, is a triumph of passive aggression, a killjoy and a source of exquisitely bleak comedy.

The novel’s plot is serviceable, possessing an appropriate roster of possible culprits and a wide array of laptops, cell phones, and CCTVs through which to rummage; still, the book’s real strength lies in its characters: their personalities, their emotions, and their little ways. “Sir Bufton Tufton” is unable to disguise his contempt for ordinary people; Miriam is shown perceptively in both her grief and her ambivalence about her life’s trajectory; Helena’s wretchedness over incidents she herself didn’t understand is palpable, as is her agony over being exposed publicly. Kind, sweet Davy is a joy, and his god-awful girlfriend is a pearl beyond price. Finally, Manon is a fully developed, which is to say credibly flawed, human being, especially in her unregulated feelings toward intimacy. This is a most promising start to what, I hope, will be a substantial series.

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Friendship, opines the odious gangster Johnny Caspar in the Coen brothers’ classic gangster film Miller’s Crossing, “is a mental state.” The joke, of course, is that Caspar, like nearly everyone else in the film — the only exception being Gabriel Byrne’s brooding loner, Tom Regan — has no idea whatsoever what the nature of friendship is. In his mind it is merely a reciprocal business arrangement, and the worst sort of business at that: you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours — and when it’s convenient to do so, I’ll stick a knife in your back instead. There is little affection and no love in Caspar’s conception of friendship; it is a conception more suitable for jackals than humans. It is also, sadly, a conception that is becoming increasingly prominent in modern political and economic life, and, it is difficult to avoid feeling, in the culture as a whole.

So is friendship, then, “a mental state’? Yes; but as Alexander Nehamas’s charming and perceptive On Friendship reminds us, it is also a great deal more than that. Nehamas, a professor of philosophy at Princeton, has become my go-to guy when people ask me the question, “Why don’t philosophers write about things that matter to human beings?” His first book was on Nietzsche — it was and remains one of the best books on Nietzsche — a thinker whose tendency to treat every idea as if it were a matter of life and death has always made him attractive to those who have repudiated the notion that philosophy should consist of abstract theorizing about arcane matters. Nietzsche was also, of course, a wonderful writer, explosively metaphoric, never dry or dull. Nehamas’s more recent books range widely, delving into Foucault, Proust, and the ancient Greek philosophers and also investigating television and popular media, for which he has shown a somewhat surprising and admirable appreciation. In 2007 he published Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art, a model for philosophers who want to reach beyond the confines of the narrowly academic audience, and On Friendship pursues that same vital goal.

Part of what interests Nehamas about friendship is how difficult it is to talk about it; and, more interestingly still, how difficult it is to talk meaningfully about our friends. Although we feel that we know our friends better than we know anyone, we seem quite unable to provide a complete or satisfying answer to the question of what it is we like about them. Every attempt to explain or justify the love we feel for a friend feels inconclusive, vague, and somewhat banal: it seems to miss the point. “I could tell you that I like [my friend] because he is kind, entertaining, or interesting, and so on,” he writes, “but such attempts at explanation can only go so far. They are disappointingly vague and they explain much less than we might think.” A key text, here, is the Essays of Michel de Montaigne, which include an essay on friendship dedicated to Montaigne’s friend Étienne de la Boétie:

It is a strange essay and also, apparently, a failure. It hardly touches La Boétie’s life, character, and accomplishments, as we might naturally have expected, and nowhere else in the Essays do we find a concrete picture of the man. Never at a loss for words on any subject, Montaigne seems to have almost nothing to say about the person who was by far the most important in his life.

What explains this? Part of what one senses, in reading Montaigne’s “On Friendship,” is the author’s deep ambivalence about treating the subject in an essay at all; as if to write in too much detail about one’s friend risks violating the intimacy that binds friends together. But Nehamas is more interested in a different idea: that a friendship, by its very nature, can never be adequately captured in the general terms provided by language, in part because it is essential to the relation that we cannot, in advance, say what is or what it will bring us. Indeed, the publication history of the Essays shows Montaigne struggling with the question of how to represent his friend. He had first intended to include a treatise by La Boétie, so that his readers could appreciate his genius for themselves. For political reasons — but also, in Nehamas’s view, because he had come to see this as a bad strategy (what if the essay did not strike his readers as forcefully as it had struck him?) — he revised the plan, intending instead to include a selection of La Boétie’s sonnets. But this idea, too, came to seem naïve and was dropped.

Ultimately Montaigne rejected the attempt to explain his friendship and instead left us with an essay that centers on the very impossibility of providing such an explanation — the impossibility, that is, of capturing in general terms something as unique and singular as a particular love that connects two unique, particular individuals. “What Montaigne does emphasize, again and again, is the private nature of their relationship, a friendship that is theirs and theirs alone: it ‘has no other model than itself, and can be compared only with itself.’” This leads to Montaigne’s famous statement about La Boétie, which Nehamas calls “the most moving statement about friendship ever made”: “If you press me to tell you why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed except by answering: ‘Because it was he, because it was I.’ ”

The point is not simply that human individuals are complex and unique, and therefore hard to describe. For Nehamas, friends, like other things we care deeply about, including works of art, are to be valued in part because their value, and the possibilities they open up for us, cannot be fully understood or predicted. A purely instrumental relationship — say, my relationship with the mechanic who fixes my car — will not involve love nor count as friendship, at least not as long as I know precisely what I am getting out of the relationship and am uninterested in anything beyond that. So long as that remains the case, I will regard “my” mechanic as essentially replaceable; if, one day, he stays home and his equally competent partner shows up to replace my fan belt, I have suffered no loss. “In an impersonal relationship all that matters is how well the job is done.” And because this is all that matters, the value of instrumental relationships can be fully captured in language; there is no mysterious further mysterious element that resists articulation. A relationship becomes personal — and the difficulty Montaigne experienced with respect to his friend arises — precisely at the point when one begins to value, not just the particular and definable salutary consequences of an arrangement reached with a certain other person but the person herself, who possesses virtues one has not yet discerned and who will open up possibilities one cannot as yet predict. And this is what is crucial: at this point, when one comes to like a person for herself, it is no longer clear just what one expects or hopes for from the relationship. Following in Montaigne’s footsteps, Nehamas explores the point with reference to one of his own friends:

“And why do you like him?” . . . Although I had no problem with [this] question before, once my relationship with Tomas became personal, I no longer know how to answer it. Once I came to like Tomas himself and not just what he could do for me, I could no longer explain exactly why that was so . . . When our relationship is entirely instrumental, I know exactly what I want from you in advance, and anyone who can provide it for me will do . . . When our relationship, though, is not instrumental, when love is involved, I actually don’t know what I want from you, and it isn’t clear which features of yours account for my love.

This, according to Nehamas, explains the deep power of friendship: to be someone’s friend is to commit oneself to a kind of openness to being moved and altered in ways one cannot predict and so cannot control:

When I become your friend, I don’t take my desires for granted. I submit myself to you, and I am willing to want new things, to acquire new desires, perhaps even to adopt new values as a result of our relationship. I can’t know in advance what any of these will be, especially since you, too, are going to change through our friendship in ways neither one of us can anticipate. Our friendship promises — and continues to promise, as long as it lasts — a better future, but all that I can know about that future is that I can’t approach it with anyone but you.

This account of friendship’s transformative power is a useful and insightful corrective to an all-too-influential picture of human agency that pictures human beings as knowledgeable, rational agents in possession of fixed desires and goals, whose behavior consists mostly in seeking to satisfy those desires and achieve those goals in the most efficient way possible. Things are, in fact, far more complex than this, and the fact that they are is to be celebrated. In a world in which we always knew what we were doing — if we could even imagine such a thing — life would be static and stagnant, a bland, repetitive game played according to rigid, unalterable rules.

The account of friendship contained in On Friendship bears significant similarity to the account of beauty and art offered in Only a Promise of Happiness. This is no accident, for Nehamas frequently draws comparisons between our relations to the people we love and our relations to the things, particularly artworks, that we love. “Our reactions to art can model our friendships. Most centrally, of course, we love both art and our friends, and in the same way,” he writes. In a fascinating discussion of Yasmina Reza’s play Art — a play in which three friends find themselves at odds when one purchases an expensive minimalist painting — he notes that “After the fight, Marc confesses that what has really hurt him is that he feels that a white painting has replaced him in Serge’s affections (a reminder that friends and works of art can play similar roles in our lives).” Nehamas sees Art as dramatizing the way in which our relationships with other persons (and with art!) involve the constant interpretation and reinterpretation of the people about whom we care, the constant posing and re-posing of the question, Who is this person, anyway? (Which leads irresistibly to the fundamental question of philosophy: Who am I?) As he points out, the three friends in the play cannot even agree on what the painting Serge has purchased looks like; the painting, as he says, manifests an “indeterminacy” that is metaphoric for the relations between the characters, and for the uncertainty which, while a necessary element of genuine friendship, can under the wrong circumstances turn quickly to hostility and distrust.

His consideration of Art also provides Nehamas with the opportunity to advance the surprising claim that, of the various art forms, theater is best suited to take friendship as its subject. This is because, in his view, friendship depends on and is manifested in small actions and gestures that need to be seen (a description won’t do, since we might disagree on the correct interpretation — so the novel is out) and that can only be understood as acts of friendship within the context of a sequence of actions that take place over time (so painting, too, is out — as Nehamas points out, “no gesture, look, or bodily disposition, no attitude, feeling, or emotion, no action and no situation is associated with friendship firmly enough to make its representation a matter for the eye”):

Friendship is an embodied relationship, and its depictions require embodiment as well: they must include the looks, the gestures, the tones of voice, and the bodily dispositions that are essential to textured communication and on which so much of our understanding of our intimates is based. But no description of looks, gestures and tones of voice can ever be complete, and so no description can communicate whether these belong to can act of friendship or not. Many aspects of the behavior of friends are irreducibly visual, and that is another reason that friendship is a difficult subject for narrative, to which description is essential. But, as we have seen, it is inherently temporal, and that makes friendship a subject unsuitable to painting. Looks, gestures, tones of voice, and bodily dispositions are the stuff of drama, which is, accordingly, the medium in which friendship is best represented.

If, like me, you find such claims both surprising and, on reflection, surprisingly plausible, you may find yourself wondering about their implications for the increasingly common phenomenon of technologically mediated friendships. More and more people claim to have close friends, and in some cases lovers, with whom they communicate mostly or even entirely online. Can such relationships be genuine friendships if, as Nehamas says, many elements of friendship are “irreducibly visual”? It could be suggested, of course, that such technologies as Skype and FaceTime provide us with visual access to physically distant friends, but I have doubts about this; the technology is not yet at the point where Skypeing with a friend is anything like talking to one face to face, and I would not be at all surprised if Nehamas, confronted with the question, were to insist that a visual connection of this sort would still not really be enough. There is a reason, I suspect, that Nehamas focuses on theater, an art form in which the performers are not only visible to the audience but physically present. Some will object that this overemphasizes the physical (and I am not certain that Nehamas would disagree); some, too, will complain that Nehamas’s account over-emphasizes the visual. One must be careful, at any rate, not to overstate the case: Nehamas does not himself explicitly claim that the “irreducibly visual” aspects of friendship are necessary, in the sense that a friendship could not exist without them, and there are reasons to resist this view. Blind people, after all, are surely capable of friendship! (For that matter, one might ask: what does Nehamas’s view imply about the possibility of purely epistolary relationships?)

A book as rich and provocative as this one is bound to open up as many questions as it answers, and to say that it does so is no criticism; it is, indeed, a compliment. Friendship is, after all, a complex phenomenon. It is also — as Nehamas reminds us by highlighting the lack of knowledge and control we manifest in entering into friendships — a potentially dangerous one. “A new friendship always brings with it the prospect of serious and unpredictable change,” and there is no guarantee that the change it brings will take the form of moral improvement:

Among the most remarkable features of friendship is that even a good friendship, valuable as it is, can involve base, even abhorrent behavior: friendship transformed Achilles into a raging beast, and Pylades helped Orestes murder his own mother. And sometimes immoral behavior can actually provoke our admiration: that’s what we feel for Silien, the hero of Jean-Pierre Melville’s stunning film, Le Doulos (1962), a gangster who lies, cheats, beats, kills, and eventually dies tragically in what turns out to have been all along a vain effort to save his only friend in the world.

That Silien is capable of such dedication to another person shows how far he is from the pathologically self-interested Jonny Caspar. Aristotle tells us that a friend is “another self,” but the morally stunted gangsters of Miller’s Crossing seem to be capable of friendship only with themselves. Still, neither Silien nor Caspar are straightforwardly commendable from a moral point of view; if there is any coincidence between the virtues of friendship and those of morality, it is a highly imperfect one. It is to Nehamas’s credit that he recognizes and forces us to contemplate the fact that friendship, which in our culture is all too often the subject of easy praise as a simple, unadulterated good, reveals itself on closer inspection to be a complex, mysterious, and troubling phenomenon. And also, of course, a fundamental one: no matter how ambivalent one might feel about it — and I experienced many moments of uncertainty and ambivalence while reading this wise, admirable, and highly pleasurable book — I, for one, must confess that I can’t imagine human life without it.

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“Writing about Africa (italics to denote place of public imagination as opposed to continent of fifty countries and a billion people) as a non-African is a tense business. You risk accusations of essentialism from the authenticity police, especially if your work appears to contradict their own essentialism. “Write what you know!” they bluster. And thus with one trite aphorism historical fiction is consigned to . . . well, history.

“My novel The Death of Rex Nhongo is set in Zimbabwe, but it’s not about that. Instead, it’s a loose-limbed thriller of betrayal and moral bankruptcy. In fact, now I think about it, I can honestly say that I have written what I know. Unfortunately, I don’t know everything. And it’s about that, too.

“To be fair to the essentialists, there has been an awful lot of rubbish written by non-Africans set in Africa. But, there’s been some good stuff, too . .” . — C.B. George

 

Heart of Darkness
By Joseph Conrad

“Conrad’s novella of a journey up the Congo River in search of the mysterious ivory trader Mr. Kurtz is a peculiar, ambiguous, and utterly gripping tale. Also, it has surely been subject to more criticism than any other work of fiction, with Chinua Achebe memorably describing its author as “a bloody racist.” Was he? I’m tempted to be flip here and quote Avenue Q (“Everyone’s a little bit . . . “). Either way, Conrad writes, “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” And there’s not much arguing with that.”

 

Brazzaville Beach
By William Boyd

“William Boyd is a masterful storyteller, and this novel is the apotheosis of his craft. Ecologist Hope Clearwater reflects on the two sets of events that have defined her life — her relationship with a deluded, brilliant, bonkers mathematician, and her work at a chimpanzee research center. Boyd deploys a thriller engine to propel us through an extraordinary examination of what makes us human and what makes humans animals.”

 

The Poisonwood Bible
By Barbara Kingsolver

“The first time I read The Poisonwood Bible, it paralyzed me — if Kingsolver could make a story do this, what point to my superficial tinkering? Fortunately, I quickly remembered I am a novelist and therefore bullheaded. This is about an American family who move to Congo at the time of independence with their deluded missionary father — religious conquest is also “not a pretty thing.” If you want to know more, you have to read it. In fact, you simply have to read it.”

 

The Catastrophist
By Ronan Bennett

“Another novel set around Congolese independence. Another novel of male delusion — I’m spotting a theme. Does Africa provide the perfect backdrop for such characters, or do they simply appeal to me? I’ll save that question for therapy. In this case, Gillespie follows Italian journalist Inès to Léopoldville in the hope of rekindling their relationship. He is mystified that a woman would prefer to commit to a righteous cause than his rather detached charms. I feel his pain.”

 

The Rift
By Alex Perry

“A book of nonfiction and the only one on this list that is actually about Africa (though still not “about Africa“). A former correspondent for the likes of Newsweek and Time, Perry reflects on largely unreported stories from the continent of rapid growth, technological development, failing aid and intervention, and, most of all, local solutions to local problems. That it’s written by a non-African is an irony of which Perry is all too aware, but it remains an insightful, humble, hopeful piece of work.”

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Where does Donald Ray Pollock belong? The title of the novel’s first book suggested one answer: His 2008 story collection, Knockemstiff, was named after the pugnacious southern Ohio town where he grew up. But while Knockemstiff put him on the map, his sensibility is still off the grid. Contemporary literary culture thrives on bright young things and long-toiling midlisters, but Pollock is a longtime paper mill employee who entered an MFA program and began writing in earnest in his fifties. And the parcel of Ohio he writes about is similarly hard to place, more a confluence of other regions than one with a clear definition itself.

“Probably half the people who lived [in Knockemstiff] had originally lived in Kentucky or West Virginia,” he says. “Growing up I probably was thinking of where I lived as more being in the South than anywhere else. My thing in my last two novels has been people from different places having this moment or meeting up at some point. Because I’m in southern Ohio, they’re going to meet up in southern Ohio eventually.”

Which is to say he writes about quintessentially American culture clashes, in a style that suggests multiple locales as well. In his two novels, 2011’s The Devil All the Time and the new The Heavenly Table, he collides southern-style preachers, midwestern farmers, and city slickers in prose that accommodates noir, Twain-like humor, and Border Trilogy−era Cormac McCarthy. The common thread is old-fashioned sin and violence. In The Heavenly Table, an army camp is barely holding together, undone by local prostitutes and a gay officer fearfully hiding his orientation; meanwhile, an outlaw band of brothers in Georgia named Cane, Chimney, and Cob have escaped their hyperreligious and abusive father and are determined to spread mayhem on their way north. Pollock’s moral universe is unflinchingly payback-oriented: Tardweller, a farm owner who deceives the brothers, gets his comeuppance via a machete in the neck: “He remained upright, his eyes blinking rapidly and his mouth opening and closing like a landed fish sucking air.”

Whether they’re played for laughs or tragedy, Pollock’s bloody milieus suggest we’re never too far from our most violent capabilities. In this edited version of our conversation, Pollock speaks about the use of violence in his fiction, religion, television, and his unusual path into publishing. —Mark Athitakis

The Barnes & Noble Review: Your first book, Knockemstiff, was set in contemporary southern Ohio. The Devil All the Time was set after World War II. This one is set in 1917. What’s prompting you to go deeper and deeper into the past?

Donald Ray Pollock: My initial idea [for The Heavenly Table] was to write a story about an army camp that actually existed here in the town where I live, Chillicothe. Camp Sherman. I was talking to a local historian one day, and he was telling me about the camp, and I thought, I can maybe write a book about this.

I really can’t explain why I keep going back into the past, other than I guess I just feel better about the past than I do the present. I’m not tech savvy at all, and I really don’t even want to get into all that; I think that to write a contemporary book you have to, at least to an extent. I’m just more comfortable in the past.

BNR: Do you feel that it’s easier to write about characters with violent temperaments if you’re writing about them in the context of the past?

DRP: I don’t think that’s it, because I think America is more violent right now than it ever has been, at least around here where I live.

BNR: In your two novels, you’re very interested in children who have experienced an extreme religious upbringing that leads to curdled and violent behavior. How much does that match your own perspective on religion?

DRP: I’m Episcopalian, and I’m very liberal as far as religious views. One of the reasons I was attracted to Episcopalianism is because you don’t really even have to believe in God. Where I grew up, there was a little church and it was very fire-and-brimstone. I know a lot of people who believe in the Bible literally, that whatever is in the Bible is true. Between the politics and the religion, it kind of gets mixed up into this brew of people who are Christians but who have some strange ideas about an eye for an eye. I have always been fascinated with people who can believe that strongly in something. When I write about it, that’s where it’s coming from. I’m just fascinated that somebody could really believe that the earth is only 4,000 years old or whatever.

BNR: So it’s more the rigidity you’re critiquing than religion, per se.

DRP: I’m not critiquing religion. I think religion’s a good thing. If nothing else, it gives us some rules to live by. I’m even a little bit envious of someone who can believe it. At least they have that belief. They are going through life thinking they’re going to heaven, this isn’t all, this isn’t the end or anything like that.

BNR: The three brothers in the Jewett gang are obsessed with a pulp novel called The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket, which I’m assuming is modeled after [Confederate outlaw] Bloody Bill Anderson, using it as a model for their criminal behavior. That becomes their Bible, in a way.

DRP: Actually, I didn’t get the idea for that dime novel from Bloody Bill Anderson. Until you brought his name up I’d forgotten all about him. I wanted them to have a book, and I goofed around with a few titles and came up with that. In my unconscious mind I might have been thinking about Bloody Bill Anderson, but I wasn’t really thinking about him at the time. For Cane I suppose it’s sort of an inspiration; he uses that as a kind of textbook on how to get out of where they are. Chimney is interested in the sex and the violence, of course. Cob is just a little leery of it, I think, after his brothers get to talking about it more seriously.

BNR: When people talk about your influences, they often mention John Cheever or Flannery O’Connor or Denis Johnson or Cormac McCarthy. This book strikes me as more intentionally Twain-like.

DRP: I don’t think Twain was really on my mind so much, but I was trying to make the book funny, at least in places. I was trying to model it on a better version of a dime novel. Some of the characters who pop up, when those got on the page it was like, This is an opportunity. I can use this to do some funny stuff.

BNR: Do you feel that for each book you need to make the violence more grotesque, visceral, intense? I think about the scene where Tardweller is killed in this book, or in your previous book, the scene of a tent preacher pouring spiders on his head.

DRP: I’m not consciously trying to say, OK, this one’s got to be even weirder than the last one. I want things to happen, and with these people, this is the sort of thing that occurs in their lives. With the death of Tardweller, compared to some of the stuff that goes on nowadays, that wasn’t that violent, I guess, to me. I hate to say it, but for the last four or five years I’ve been influenced a lot by TV, stuff like Boardwalk Empire and Breaking Bad. They go so far with some of the violence in these shows I’m thinking, Well, OK, I can do this and people aren’t going to be freaking out.

BNR: How is television helpful for a novelist?

DRP: I think the big thing is the plot. You have this character who appears maybe in the third episode and then he’s back in it in the tenth episode. There’s just so many plot threads going through these shows, and I think that’s what they do best, besides coming up with the characters. I think that if you’re going to write a novel you have to have some sort of plot. I’ve read a few that don’t really seem to have one that are really good, but I don’t think that one of mine would come off if I didn’t have some sort of plot, or at least pushing the action forward as much as I can.

BNR: What elevates a novel beyond the plot for you? I suppose that’s a way of asking what the negative effects of television are.

DRP: The language. As far as getting to a point where it’s better than a dime novel, the language and the way that you treat the characters, where you care about the characters or you just don’t give a damn about them. I can’t really say that I’ve read that many dime novels, but I would say that that would be a part of it, and maybe just a more involved plot instead of “Bloody Bill robs banks and eventually gets killed,” that sort of thing.

BNR: You do a good job of ventriloquizing this bad, overly florid, pulp-novel writing at a couple of points in The Heavenly Table. I would imagine that maybe you’d spent a little bit of time looking into them.

DRP: When I was a kid we didn’t have any books in the house. My parents, though, did read a lot of romance magazines and true-crime magazines, that sort of thing. When I started reading that’s what I was reading. We’re talking from, say, 1960, and that stuff was pretty . . . I doubt very much it was written very well.

BNR: There’s something about the language of The Heavenly Table that seems to match the time in which it was set. I think that’s true about The Devil All the Time, too, which has this ’50s and ’60s, Jim Thompson−esque, noir-ish vibe, while this is a little bit more countrified. How much do you think about the relationship between language and dialogue and the time in which your writing is set?

DRP: With The Devil All the Time I was definitely trying to write short sentences for the most part and not waste a word if at all possible. With this one, when I began there were some long sentences in there, and I just went with that. Of course, as I revised I changed some of it, and I cut some sentences and added on to others. Once I got the rhythm, it played in my head while I was working. I was trying to put the reader into 1917 as much as I could.

BNR: Did you spend much time researching life in southern Ohio in 1917?

DRP: There are about four or five local historians around here who have written small books about Camp Sherman, so I read those. I looked up a few things on the Internet as far as what would things cost at that time. Other than that, no. That was about it as far as the research goes. I just recently saw a quote from somebody who said, “If you’ve got to do a bunch of research for a book, you’re not ready to write.” There’s not a lot of stuff there that somebody probably couldn’t just invent. I just didn’t feel comfortable with doing the whole historical accuracy thing

BNR: What helped you break away from being focused explicitly on the military camp?

DRP: The brothers. When I started writing this thing I was flailing around like crazy trying to figure out where my story was. One day these three brothers just appeared on the page. It’s one of those things. I think when you’re writing fiction there’s some things that you just can’t explain. They appeared. For several days I wasn’t really paying that much attention to them, I didn’t know if they were going to be in the book or not. One morning a few days after that I just started writing that first chapter, and by the time I finished it I thought, I think this is my story. I still had the camp in there at that point, but then the farmer came along, and his son runs off and he thinks he’s going to join the army. I’ve got to say, the book was a real mess for quite a while.

BNR: How long in total did it take to write the novel?

DRP: It took a long time. I got lucky: The Devil All the Time did really well in France and Germany, so I kept getting invited back to France. I did a lot of traveling for a couple years while I was trying to work on the book. But the problem with me is that I’m not a good traveler. I can only work at home, and every time I did a trip — I went to France maybe nine times — I lost a month to get back into the rhythm and just to get back to working again. I would say that [The Heavenly Table] took around three years, but with a lot of interruptions. I had told my wife at the beginning of last year, “I’m not going anywhere this year, I’m finishing this book,” and I managed to do that.

BNR: Is there a distinction between how European and American audiences respond to your work?

DRP: With the French and the Germans, they’re looking at my work as a picture of what it’s like to live in the Midwest. I think with the American readers, it’s more like, “Hey, it’s just a good story.” The French are really into this sort of genre or whatever that I write in, people like Daniel Woodrell. I think that they see writers either write about the East Coast or the West Coast, and then there’s these people that are writing about the Midwest, and their books are probably about what it’s really like over there. The French are, I’ve got to say, terrific readers. They’re probably a lot more into books than we are.

BNR: When Knockemstiff came out you were presented as an example of a working-class writer who was writing quality fiction. Around the same time, a debate started surging arguing that MFA programs are enclaves for the privileged, and that there was a whole American class that was being neglected in books that the big houses were putting out and written by MFA grads. Do you buy into that argument? Do you think that territory has changed at all since you’ve started publishing?

DRP: I went to an MFA program when I was fifty. I quit my job and I had a chance to go to this program at Ohio State, and they were going to give me a stipend for three years as long as I taught a class every quarter. I looked upon it as, OK, this is my way out of the paper mill. Because I wasn’t going have to worry about getting a job right off the bat, and I was also going to be around people who loved writing. And I’d never had that before. It was a fantastic deal for me. The people that I was with in that program, they weren’t privileged or wealthy.

With that being said, though, I don’t think you need to go to an MFA program to learn how to write, or to be a writer. Basically, it’s reading and writing, and you can do that working at Walmart. If you’ve got the drive, you can do that selling shoes or whatever. Some people go to an MFA program believing, “This is what I want to do. I want to be a writer,” and by the end of that program they realize, “No, I don’t think I want to be a writer.” There’s a lot of work and there’s a lot of disappointment.

BNR: Not a lot of pay, often.

DRP: Yeah, not a lot of pay. It’s an expensive way, I guess, to find out that that’s not what you want to do. But at the same time, it gives other people a leg up, at least a little bit of time to learn what this thing’s all about.

BNR: Do you still teach?

DRP: No, I don’t. I’m a lousy teacher. I found that out when I was in that MFA program. I was a fifty-year-old factory worker, and I was teaching freshman comp to eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. I couldn’t get it. It was a big disappointment at the time, because my plan was to try to maybe publish a collection of stories and then land a job at a small college somewhere. I thought that would be a really nice way to live. But then I got up there and figured out, “You’re so terrible at this.” It was like, I can either go work at Walmart or I can try to write.

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