If David Bezmozgis seems a tad prickly, even downright hostile, it's nothing personal. A dauntingly mature writer preparing to launch a hugely anticipated first novel simultaneously in New York, London and Toronto, he has taken pains to state his position on media interviews by making one up and posting it on his personal website.
In it, the character presumed to be the author is unremittingly rude to an imagined interviewer so witty and insightful as to approach an ideal of the type – and thus function as further reproof to the real-life stumblebums the real-life author is preparing to encounter in droves.
It's just a game, then. But as with all things Bezmozgesque – an adjective the strikingly high quality of his novel, The Free World, could well come to justify – it is consummately well played.
After allowing the interviewer to flatter him with an incisive analysis of The Free World, the author denies being David Bezmozgis, claiming instead to be a goatherd from Madagascar.
"Why would you do that?" the interviewer asks.
"Because I feel like it," not-Bezmozgis replies. "Because it amuses me. Because I am not entirely right in the head. Because I hate being interviewed."
"Is that true?"
"Ask my goats."
The real Bezmozgis, talking on a cell phone from New York, where he has spent the past year with his growing family as a fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, is coolly professional. In real interviews, the goatherd makes way for the dutiful son of striving Jewish emigrants from the old Soviet Union, proving to them that writing fiction is a serious career.
They didn't buy it when their Latvian-born but Canadian-raised son, with a fresh-minted English degree from McGill University, first broached the possibility.
"Soviet people understood professions," he explains. "And my profession? I had no answer for that." So he and his parents, equally naive, agreed on a compromise that would see him study film, "which presented creative opportunities but also seemed better defined because it had professions – you could be an editor or a director or any number of other things."
That was his one attempt at pragmatism, according to the author.
Although he may seem to have strayed from the supposedly straight and narrow by becoming a writer after all – a process he explains movingly in the one other piece posted on his website, a homage to the largely forgotten Jewish American writer Leonard Michaels – Bezmozgis's writing was recognized as masterly the moment his first story appeared (in The New Yorker, no less, which publication recently named him one of its "top 20 under 40" writers).
His debut story collection, Natasha, which told the stories of recently arrived Soviet immigrants in Toronto, drew gobsmacked raves of the sort Alice Munro might envy – as in "scary good," "irresistibly original," "dazzling" and "extraordinary." With The Free World, Bezmozgis expands his scope massively while losing none of the precision, insight and authority that so impressed admirers of Natasha. As first novels go, it is as accomplished – and as funny – as anything published since V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas 50 years ago.
In his second book, Bezmozgis once again explores the marginal and displaced community of Jews from the former Soviet Union, among whom he grew up. But this time, they are not depicted in the manner traditional to immigrant fiction, as struggling to adapt to their new Western homes, but rather in mid-journey, stalled in Rome while applying for visas to here, there or everywhere
Although it made little impression on the adults in his own family, according to Bezmozgis, their own year of limbo in Rome struck the budding storyteller. "I was just fascinated by this in-between stage, this limbic period they went through, and wanted to know about it," he says.
After depicting the North American here-and-now in Natasha – putting a largely unknown community "on the literary map, such as it is" – Bezmozgis says he went back to mine "that whole other lode of experience that preceded the immigrant experience, and that was the emigrant experience."
As a typical detail, Bezmozgis's Krasnansky family decides to apply for settlement in Canada, not the United States, after a quick chat with an ill-informed friend in a dingy stairwell. One Krasnansky wonders how to explain the sudden switch to her parents, who are also along for the one-way journey.
"What's there to explain?" her husband responds. "They understand how it is. One door closed, another door opened."
A social worker with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society offers advice: "If you want to go to Toronto, don't ask for Toronto. Good? Good."
Although he downplays the autobiographical content of The Free World, which is largely based on interviews with friends of his parents, Bezmozgis admits that a similar stairwell encounter accounts for his own Canadian citizenship. And although he has pursued most of his career in the United States, he wants it to be known that he is, indeed, Canadian, with a house in Toronto, a pregnant wife and a two-year-old daughter.
Or so he says now. In his most extensive published interview to date, he described himself as "a black man, born to Catholic parents in Togo, and a convert to Islam."
Whatever: The one unassailable fact is that David Bezmozgis has arrived.