I used to write very late at night from about 10pm to 5am, because I really like the quiet. You will never be interrupted. I did that till my kids were born. They are 2 and 5 now. I can’t do that anymore because they wake up early. I have to be with them in the morning. Now I write in a painfully boring schedule: 9 to 5, almost exactly banker’s hours. With kids, your writing time gets cut in half effectively, so you have to learn how to be more efficient.
Do you think your writing has improved?
I know how to navigate better structurally. But in every book, most of the time during the process you are totally unsure if it’s gonna come to anything. I haven’t reached the point that I’m absolutely sure what I’m doing. There is always a sense of directionlessness. But then every so often you have a day that it clicks. You seem to know what you are doing, but that’s brief.
Your work now also includes running McSweeney’s and the tutoring centers. How do you balance writing and these aspects of your work?
I have one day of the week that I come into the office. Usually only one day I go in and do all my meetings. I have to compartmentalize and try to catch up with everybody at that point but during the week, I’m getting emails and occasional conference calls with the centers’ board of directors. For the most part, all of these entities are really well run on their own. Once you get them started, which is the hard part, the stuff takes over and they know better than I do how to serve their neighborhoods. I’m lucky to work with a lot of qualified people so they would let me to disappear for days on end if need to write.
Are you still editing McSweeney’s?
Yeah, but it’s the same thing. There are a lot of other people involved. The other editors, they do the hard part, which is to sift through thousands of submissions, deciding generally what we might do for a given issue. The stuff they like, I would read them and approve certain percentage of them and go from there. The hard line-by-line editing. I don’t have to do that too often, but I really enjoy doing it, so I will do a few books and a few stories a year in any given issue. If something needs a lot of work it’s most likely done by Jordan Bast, the managing editor. The key to everything is surrounding yourself with good people.
I'm surprised to find you a very calm person, much in contrast to the clever and chaoticm-minded protagonist of your acclaimed debut novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
I’m definitely in a different place stylistically, and that book is very hard for me to read now because it reads like it was written by someone who was much younger and a little bit out of control, maybe. It was really raw. It gets a little bit too much credit for being clever, because most of the book was pretty straightforward and unvarnished. It didn’t have a whole lot of layers, to the most of it. I was at a point where I had to examine the form in every case, whether it was the copyright page or the preface or, everything I was interested in exploding the form and putting it back together in some new way, and that was what McSweeney’s was doing too. We were publishing experimental fiction exclusively so if something was straightforward, we weren’t very interested in it at that time. The point of my first book, and what subsequently happened to McSweeney’s was that we found over and over that a good story well told had its inherent power to it. The writer had something urgent to say. More often than not that would blow through or vaporize the stylistic tricks. A lot of time we found, people who are stylistically restless, sometimes they have something to say, sometimes they don’t. I think every story has the most appropriate form to be told, and at that time, with that story, where I was in my life, the place my brain was at, that was the right form. But if I were to rewrite that story now, where I was with my family and everything, I would probably do it in a different way now. I’m a little bit more interested in the story first, not the form first. Where I was as an editor at that time, I was more interested in form. These things, I feel like I’ve aged a lot in the last ten years. I feel that book of that time was many decades ago. It’s hard to have a grasp on who that person was.
McSweeney’s was often seen as championing the sort of clever, ironic writing your first book was known for. There came a wave of writers who tried to imitate that style to a certain degree. Do you see it as somehow leading a generation of contemporary writing?
We didn’t do too much of that. We came in the tail end of that. We started in 1998. The main period of that kind of writing, whether it was David Foster Wallace or George Saunders. All of these guys are deadly sincere, by the way. They all wore their hearts on their sleeves. Stylistically sometimes on the surface it seemed at a distance, or ironic, although I think the word ironic is always misused. But that style people talked about, we definitely didn’t invent it. We published those guys, and we still do. But we were at the tail end of it. We can’t take any credit for it, and also, after the first two issues, already, the range of what we were publishing was way beyond that narrow milieu. People liked to generalize and I think it’s very convenient to label but even looking at those issues now, it’s hard to see any pattern or any style. But if you look at any given issue, only two out of twelve you may find any style that at all adhered to those guidelines you may put forth. We went back and did it. We were wondering, boy, was there any style? We were looking at them and found nothing that unified all these things. But it’s hard to shake a label when people want to paint a wide swath of contemporary literature in one brush.
How would you define the current trends in contemporary literature?
I think we are in an age there is no definite style or movement. There is even no group either self-claimed or otherwise. There is nothing. There is not one magazine that publishes a dominate style, or favors one style. At this point, I think there's a pluralism that embraces all, outside tiny magazines that have a very particular style. If anything I think the last seven years or so is an era in which younger popular writers have been writing in a very traditional style, and their novels are pretty straightforward and not very stylistically restless. If anything, it’s a style of no style.
Is that a good thing?
I believe in a pluralistic artistic landscape. I grew up as a painter. I studied painting through college. At that time, we were getting out of an era of all that abstraction. Painting and expression were accepted again as a Neo-expressionism, like Salle, Schnabel and Fischl and those guys, and from there, instead of their work eclipsing abstraction, it existed along with it, and performance art and every other type of style. That’s how in the last twenty years, all the styles coexisted and I think that’s the best. I don’t like it when there is the perception that one way to write or create is ideal or superior. That happened with abstract expressionism, and a lot of critics thought that painting was reaching its purest form and everything else was either antiquated or bastardized or compromised. I think that’s a mistake. I think this type of critical fascism doesn’t have a positive role in the art world.
But there has never been a critically acclaimed superior style in literature. Are you satisfied with the contemporary era of no style? How does it compare with literary trends in the past?
There has been a type of impatience with anybody who breaks a stylistic form in the past ten years. Especially after 9/11, there was a critical shift, and anybody who was bringing attention to the form of dealing with serious issues was deemed frivolous. There are still a few writers who wrote about 9/11 and are still writing about 9/11 who are eviscerated. So after that, there has been, those writers who twenty five years ago would have been in the forefront. Back in the 70s there were writers like Donald Barthelme who were mainstream in a way, also like Robert Coover and John Barth. They were incredibly experimental. Those writers coming up today would have a hard time finding a publisher at all. There has been a pretty significant shift in that the most attention books are getting is about the story. To some extent, that’s good. I believe in a more level play field. We publish Robert Coover and he is having a hard time getting reviews at all. And the landscape has changed a lot. I would like it if all these works were valued equally, as long as the quality is somewhere in the same boat.
We are seeing a lot of immigrant writers coming to the forefront. It almost seems that the book market likes to look at "inferior" cultures.
That's the cynical way to look at it, but the positive way of looking at it might be that isn’t it nice that anyone would be interested in another culture at all. Curiosity breeds enlightenment, breeds empathy, breeds a moral will. The alternative would be that no one reads about any other culture but their own. You have to take a more generous view. Writing a book is incredibly difficult. It can take years and even after years it might not come to anything. The writer has to feel incredibly drawn to a story. He either needs to satisfy his own curiosity, to ask a question that needs to be answered about life, or people, or the world, whatever it is, and from a distance, you can parse things out and categorize them, put them in boxes, label them, but that’s not what art is. It’s a very personal act, you are moved by forces sometimes you can’t even explain. It comes from the gut. It’s like you are drawn to things you can’t explain or parse. You have to be because the process is so long and so difficult. You have to take the writer at his or her word. You have to take the writer and give them the benefit of the doubt.
Which brings me to my next question. Your latest two novels, What is the What and Zeitoun, were project-based in that they were other people’s stories and you were the one writing them. How do you decide which project to take on?
In both cases, after meeting Valentino Deng and after meeting the Zeitouns, I felt a combination of being personally interested and connected to them in a way that was fundamental. That’s necessary if you want to write about living people. You have to feel a fundamental connection with them. Ideally writing any sort of story, whether it’s my first book or the last two books about living people, you have to think there’s something universal in them. There has to be something larger even if you are writing about their specific experience. With Zeitoun, there will be hundreds of stories about Katrina, but they lived through it and at that moment in history, you had a confluence of factors that would probably never overlap again. The war on terror, the paranoia against Arab Muslim Americans, and the worst disaster in American history, was the atmosphere in 2005. I’m interested in politics and I was outraged by a lot of Bush-era policies, so it was one aspect of it when I saw this is where all those policies affected this one family. I like to see the effects of governmental policies forced on one family, and I think that’s always the best way to illuminate history, from the ground level, from one person’s eyes.That’s why Valentino’s story drew me in too. It’s this civil war nobody could untangle. Maybe it’s possible to understand it if you focus on one person’s story. See it through, the whole way through his eyes. That’s what I sought to do and I think it’s relatively successful in untangling what otherwise would be considered incomprehensible.
It’s hard to disguise your political view if you live in San Francisco and run schools for children of immigrants. But I grew up in Chicago in a fairly conservative house and my older brother is a conservative consultant who worked for George Bush Sr. I’m definitely surrounded by the other side. And I like to think I’m pragmatic and reasonable and I don’t automatically have a knee-jerk liberal agenda. I think that there’s been a lot of conservative leaders over the years that I thought were smart. I think good ideas can come from any side, but I think that the more you listen to people, the more you know people who are affected by draconian or ill thought-out government policies and (the ones who listen) are more likely to be on the liberal side, because most conservatives aren’t often in touch with the underrepresented, the poor, the disenfranchised. I think in large part they maintain their beliefs relying on a certain amount of distance from the problems of the country or the world.
Can you talk about the story you're working on? The one that made you come to Beijing and go to the Double Flying Bicycle Factory to do research for?
It’s a novel that takes place a little in China, and there is a little bit of involvement of bikes. That’s all I can say. I don’t know if or when I will ever finish it. I’m already in the middle of it and it’s not well-formed enough to give a preview.
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