Yeah. I think as a novelist you have to risk a lot of things. I think it's important, especially with novels that have a degree of violence that the characters don't thin into just dramatic gaming pieces. So I had to let things slow down a little bit here and there and let the character brave her own interiors at her own pace.
I read a description that said the violent act was about the ripples after, but here it's the catalyst ...
What do you think it's really about?
I think it's about what you believe and how you come to peace with yourself.
Yeah or fail to, yeah.
It's about a lot of things. I was asked to put it in a nutshell today and it's not easy.
Well I think it's easier to put in a nutshell than my last one which was more intentionally perverse that way. I really do think it is mainly about belief and the consequences of belief. I guess my feeling is it's probably not possible or it shouldn't be an enterprise for novelists these days? Maybe ill-advised for novelists these days to write just straight realist fiction, but I like realist fiction. So what I'm interested in is the borderlands between realism and something that is a little more self aware, because I think literature should register the fact that that self awareness is our lot these days and part of that involves being aware that we're constantly being deceived by narratives all the time. And it gets harder and harder to trust a narratives. It's extremely complex and in fact, that old thing about those whom the devil would deceive he tells not lies but lesser truths, So how do we swim through all of this? I think we're suspicious of narrative and yet we're fundamentally creatures who want to believe, and I think novels are an interesting place to test the reader's seemingly contradictory instincts.
I think we get to the end and not know if one character's story was true or not.
Yeah, I didn't want to tie it up mathematically. I wanted it to be coherent but not neatly tied at the end.
Harold is pretty messed up … is that because he has nothing to believe in?
One thing that he's baffled by are people who are devout. It's one reason he becomes implausibly attracted to Rosemary, who's the social outreach worker whose faith-based belief is that it's her mission to give asylum to anyone who seeks it regardless of history. But she also has literal interpretations of scripture, which he finds lunatic (ludicrous?) And yet there's a part of him that wants metaphor not to be metaphor, that wants to believe things literally.
Do you see people like him?
Do I know people like him?
Yeah, I'm not talking about your friends.
Yeah, I know people who are messed up in the ways similar to the ways Harold is messed up and people who are scrambling. Part of it I think is as people in the educated or chattering classes get older and become more naturally reflective there's probably a turning inward in some of these people and they're not used to examining certain questions and they don't trust the terms in which other people examine those questions, like questions about faith for instance and so they're sort of without a language even to approach the questions.
Odd, that in the years you've been writing this, it's as if there's less to believe in in the world...
Yeah, I think it's all one long unfolding crisis of faith. There have been worse times certainly in human history where there have been big crises that way and yet somehow we're putting it together.
Is it intuition when you're writing a story, to move it along, to create a character?
Yeah, it is for me. I think it is for a lot of writers. I think to the degree that Kim writes speculatively, we realize she's drawing from the things fiction writers draw from, historical research, people she knows, sometimes her knowledge of the city. She understands that stories are mediated and that they're mediated often through a single person's point of view, that person's experience comes into play, that person's memory, habits of mind, blindnesses.
