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| Cathleen Schine, photo by James Hamilton |
Cathleen Schine's novels include She is Me, The New Yorkers, and, most recently, The Three Weissmanns of Westport, a modern retelling of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. Cathleen Schine's new novel, Fin & Lady, will be available in July.
A: It never occurred to me to
go anywhere near any Jane Austen book, except as a reader. It would be
presumptuous, I think we can all agree on that! So it was accidental.
One of the greatest gifts I
have been given as a reader is a terrible, terrible memory. So…I get to read
wonderful novels like Sense and Sensibility over and over again, and I never
know what’s going to happen next. It is always a fresh, illuminating
experience.
After one of these readings
of Sense and Sensibility, I was struck by how modern it seemed. I pondered the
oddity of this early 19th century novel feeling so relevant in this, the new
millennium, and not just because the characters, with all their dreams and
worries and passions and petty obsessions, are so recognizable as the people we’re
all surrounded by, but because of something structural: the link between money
and marriage. Except, in our modern world, the link is at the other end of the
process: between money and divorce.
I had been trying to think of
a way to write about adults – meaning middle-aged, even elderly people – in
love, and the whole thing just came together at that moment. I thought I would
refer to Sense and Sensibility every once in a while, that it was an
inspiration, but I got more and more involved with Austen’s book as I wrote.
When I read, I think of it as a deep and intimate conversation, and writing The
Three Weissmanns of Westport turned out to be an even deeper, more intimate
conversation.
Q: What do you make of the
continuing fascination with Jane Austen and her work, and what influence do you
think she's had on your own writing (even before The Three Weissmanns of
Westport)?
A: The obsession with Jane
Austen began long before the movie Clueless, which I love, or the recent craze
of Austen inspired genre novels. Rudyard Kipling, of all people, was an ardent Janeite.
He wrote a short story about a group of soldiers in World War I who were
Janeites: “There’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight spot.” She is
intimate, unsentimental, and her tight focus makes her somehow timeless. I’m
with Kipling.
Q: Dogs play an important
role in your previous book, The New Yorkers. Do they play a big part in your
life, too?
A: Yes, I’m one of those
people who stops every dog on the street and talks to it and pets it and lets
it jump on me while the owner pretends to try to stop it. We got a dog right
before September 11, 2001, and I was in New York during that time. Walking the
dog, having to walk the dog no matter what, especially during such an emotional
time, re-introduced me to my own city.
When I wrote The New Yorkers,
I needed comfort. I thought, Why not write the kind of book you want read? So,
yes, there are a lot of dogs in it. I also wrote a piece about Buster, the
vicious, hopeless, dear monstrous little dog we had then, for The New Yorker.
For the last ten years, we have had a jolly Cairn terrier. About half my
facebook friends are cairn terrier people. So, yes, I’m a nutty dog lady. I
would be a cat lady, too, but I’ve gotten too allergic.
Q: Do you have a particular favorite
among your books or characters, and why or why not?
A: I really don’t have a
favorite book. In some moods, I am very satisfied with a particular book, in
other moods I think it is drek. I have a number of mother and grandmother
characters in my books, and I do love them. I get very attached to minor
characters, too, perhaps because they are usually the most comic.
Q: What can you tell us about
your new book, which is coming out later this year?
A: It’s called Fin & Lady
and it’s coming out in July and the first thing I can tell you is that it has a
fantastic cover! Very groovy! It’s set in the sixties in Greenwich Village,
mostly, and the island of Capri in Italy. It’s about a boy named Fin who is
orphaned at the age of 11. His rather wild 23-year-old half sister, Lady,
becomes his guardian.
It’s about their
relationship, about what a family really is and how that idea changed during
that period and how it didn’t, about love and how that changed during that
period and how it didn’t, about freedom and responsibility and books and music
and toy soldiers and the Village and there is a collie dog in it.
Q: Anything else we should
know?
A: I’m preparing a completely
random list of annotations for Fin & Lady, linking words from the book to
various you tubes and web pages and photos and blog posts. I’m not sure where I’ll
put it. Probably on my blog. I have a blog. But I am not a blogger. Once every
three months is timely for me. So maybe this list, which I am increasingly
obsessed with, will fill that vast online communication gap!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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