Joshua Henkin doesn't just write novels. He creates worlds. His characters are so alive, they breathe on the page, and you swear if you walk a block, you'll run into one of the places he writes about. He's the author of Matrimony (A New York Times Notable book), Swimming Across the Hudson (A Los Angeles Times Notable book), and most recently The World Without You, an Indie Next Pick that is racking up so many raves, he can paper a villa with them. (I raved about it for the Boston Globe.) I'm honored to have him here to talk about writing and his extraordinary novel. Thank you, Joshua!
You
have this absolutely mastery with creating characters who are rich and
multi-faceted. So let's talk process. How do you craft your characters? And do
you find that being able to see into the lives of people on the page translates
so you can also better understand people in the flesh?
It’s a mystery to me how the book comes into being (fiction
writing is such an intuitive process), which may be why I always wonder whether
I’ll ever be able to do it again; the fraud police is always hanging over you. But for me fiction is first and foremost
about character—about making my readers come to know my characters as well as
they know the people in their own lives.
And I think the way you craft characters is that you live with them day
in and day out and you ask yourself as many questions as you can about
them. Who is your character? Where did she grow up? What kind of work does she do? Does she like spinach? Does she sleep on her back, her
stomach, or her side? It may seem
inconsequential to know (much less describe) how a character sleeps, but not if
the gesture is laden with meaning, as all gestures in fiction should be. Does the character who sleeps on her
side do so because she doesn’t like the smell of her husband’s breath? Does she do so because she hears better
out of one ear than the other and if she sleeps on her good ear she won’t be
able to hear when her child cries out at night?
In my Matrimony, Julian meets his eventual-wife Mia after
having spotted her in their college facebook. He dubs her Mia from Montreal. I wrote that phrase instinctively, probably because my own
girlfriend freshman year of college was named Laura, and my roommate called her
Laura from Larchmont. I liked the
alliterative sound of those words.
Before I wrote Mia from Montreal, I had no idea where Mia came
from. But she had to come from
somewhere, and Montreal seemed as good a place as any. But then I had to own up to what I’d
written. How did Mia’s family get
to Montreal? Had they lived there
for centuries? Were they
expatriates, and if so, from where?
And how did Mia end up back in the States, in western Massachusetts, for
college? I could have chosen Mia
from Madagascar or Mia from Maryland, and if I’d chosen Mia from Maryland,
there might have been, for all I know, a long section in Matrimony about her
family’s tangled relationship with the clamming industry. But she wasn’t Mia from Maryland, she
was Mia from Montreal, and so I discovered that her father had gone to teach
physics at McGill, forcing her mother to abandon her career in the process, and
that Mia, out of loyalty to her mother, decided to retrace her mother’s steps
back to Massachusetts. I knew none
of this until I wrote the words Mia from Montreal, just as the writer who has a
character who sleeps on her side doesn’t know why she sleeps on her side until
she does so.
Does being able to see into the lives of people on the page
translate into being better able to understand people in the flesh?
Maybe. I’d like to think that writing fiction gives you a greater
capacity for empathy. But my
suspicion is that the cause and effect is in reverse—that understanding people
better in the flesh leads you to be able to do it on the page.
Your subject seems to be family. So what was yours like?
Do you draw on it at all?
Ron
Carlson said that he writes from personal experiences whether or not he had
them. I feel the same way. Good fiction has to be emotionally
autobiographical. The writer has
to be at risk; you have to be very close to your material. That’s quite a different thing,
however, from saying that the work is narrowly autobiographical or that your
characters are based on people you know.
I come from a complicated family in that, though both my parents were
Jewish and raised in New York City, their backgrounds couldn’t have been more
different. My paternal grandfather
was a famous Orthodox rabbi who lived on the Lower East Side for fifty years
and never learned English. He
lived exclusively in a Yiddish-speaking world. My mother was raised in the Bronx, on the Grand Concourse,
in a secular Jewish home. She went
to a progressive private school with no walls between the classrooms and
everyone campaigned for Adlai Stevenson and believed that someday we’d be
speaking Esperanto. So I know a
lot about both the religious Jewish world and the secular Jewish world, and
absolutely—my knowledge of those worlds helped in writing The World Without
You.
You also teach as well as write--as I do--and I
wanted your take on what you get from your students and when you feel that you
absolutely must take a break and do nothing but write. Or does that never
happen for you?
I direct Brooklyn College’s Fiction MFA Program, and at the
risk of sounding like a pollyana, I can’t imagine a better job. In a typical year at Brooklyn we get
500 MFA fiction applicants for fifteen spots in our incoming class. So we’re dealing with some of the very
best young writers out there. In
the last few months alone, five of our recent graduates have gotten book contracts. There are writers who wouldn’t know how
to teach; for them, writing is an intuitive process and they aren’t fully
conscious of what they’re doing.
For me, it was the opposite.
I could read someone else’s short story and figure out what wasn’t working
long before I could make things work in my own stories. I needed to learn how to become a more
intuitive writer, and critiquing other people’s stories helped me do that; it
still helps me. I’ve been at this
process longer than my students have, but we’re all struggling with the same
thing—how to write convincing stories; how to make our characters come so
deeply to life they feel as real as, even realer than, the actual people in our
own lives; how to use language in a way that’s precise and beautiful and
utterly true. That never
changes. So in a way, even though
I’m the instructor, we’re all students in the room. Also, I’m a fairly social person, and writing is incredibly
solitary, so teaching gives me the chance to be with other people and to talk
about what I love.
Obviously, teaching takes time away from my writing, but a
lot of things take time away from my writing—my wife, my kids, my friends,
going out to dinner, going to the movies—and I wouldn’t trade those things for
anything in the world. So you
manage to find a balance. I write
from 9 in the morning until noon five days a week during the semester, and then
over school vacations I write more.
Do I wish there were more hours in the day? Sure. But on
balance, I’m able to find time to write.
Why do you think your novel seems to have touched a
nerve? Besides the quality of the writing, what is it about this multi-faceted
family that has won over so many critics and readers, do you think?
That’s
hard for me to say. I’m just grateful
for the response. Why something works is as mysterious to the writer as it is
to anyone else.
What's obsessing you now and why?
My new novel, which is still in its very early incubating
stages. I’d been hoping to be
further along with it at this point, but it’s still taking shape in my
mind. Not that I ever know in
advance what my book is going to be about, but I like to have some general idea
of what’s animating it, and that animation is still coming to me—coming more
slowly than I would like.
What question didn't I ask that I should have?
How many pages I threw out. Two thousand for The World Without You and three thousand
for Matrimony. I can’t even
remember for Swimming Across the Hudson, but a lot there too. Maybe I’ll be down to one thousand for
my next book, but I hope not. You
have to write a lot of bad pages to get to the good pages. I remind my students every day how much
hard work it takes to get a novel right.
Talent is important, of course, but persistence and determination are at
least as important.
>
> Thank you, thank you!
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