In the book, stories are, of necessity, told in a linear way; one thing is narrated, then another. In the immersive text I don’t have that constraint, and multiple storylines can happen in parallel, inviting the reader to choose between them.
“There are moments in stories by Bulgakov and by Garcia Marquez, both of whom I love, where things are never presented as potential facts: they’re just facts. I think that The Tiger’s Wife ended up dealing with whether or not something is potential fact.”
I write about people who are wondering about what it means to be a good person. That’s probably the main question that characters in this novel seem to struggle with: how are they going to manage to be happy, given that people die?
Wall Street is everywhere, in a sense. You could occupy Corona Park in Queens and say you’ve occupied Wall Street, because it is there too.
This migration was a singular, watershed moment in American history because it was the first time people who had been legally, forcibly held back for centuries were actually able to make a decision on their own, to leave, and to have the potential to live out their God given gifts.
But literary academia is especially funny, and especially the study of the novel. You are in the world as a person but your job is studying. It is a very comic situation, but also sad. It is like the Russian novel, sad and funny at the same time.
That impulse, which is a great impulse, is one of the things that rock is about: you want to be authentic. I think that’s why it’s so hard to be an aging rocker. Aging is all about concession: concession to the body, concession to other people.
Whereas writing, you know, you’re alone, fucking nailing yourself to the cross on that lonely white page with every word. Trekking your lonely footsteps across that virgin white snow, that endless tundra.
The year in which I was made redundant, we were required to fill in “Active Schemes of Work.” No one really knew what this meant. This is kind of the Kafkaesque nightmare of these things.
Nothing seems more uncanny than death. You know the story they tell about the Dredgeman where he’s literally ripped out of the Universe? I think that speaks to the horror and the shock of death, there’s nothing we can ever imagine to be more truly uncanny than that.