Norah Labiner is the author of the new novel Morocco. Her other books include Our Sometime Sister. She lives in Minnesota.
Q: What do you see as the relationship between Morocco and Henry James’s classic Washington Square?
A: Henry James crept up on me. He left me hints. Left a book on the table. Left his dressing gown on a chair. Here was his teacup; there was his top hat. But—I was oblivious. I was reading Philip Roth. I was watching General Hospital.
Until finally he hit me over the head with a vase of roses, like Moe from the Three Stooges, right? What could I do? I had to tell his story.
My book is an accidentally-on-purpose retelling of Washington Square. I did it from dream and I did it from memory. Morocco is an ode to haunted houses and to cats and dogs and to typewriters and to the ghosts who must have their stories told.
Q: The novel is set in Chicago--how important is setting to you in your writing?
A: There are books about place or where place becomes a character—like Dublin in Ulysses or Salinger’s New York or Saul Bellow’s Chicago.
It’s wonderful to walk along Swann’s Way or wander the moors with Emily Brontë, but these places are not real, not really. They are only memories, and more than that—they are memories of a memory.
I have a terrible sense of direction, so I think about place in the abstract. My own memory—or nostalgia—is for books that I have read or left unread: the paperbacks, the hardcovers, the library books with the name of some long-ago reader inked on the jacket. The book itself is a place. And the characters live within the little world on the page.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between the narrator of the book and your character Katherine Stern?
A: I love Katherine. She likes cake and dresses; she wants to do the right thing, or maybe she doesn’t—? She is deep or shallow depending on where she sets her chaise longue by the side of the very blue swimming pool. She is relentlessly herself, for good or bad.
The narrator is something of a ghost. She can walk through walls into the past—to tell a story. And she is drawn to Katherine’s life and family and story. Even as the years pass, she can’t let go of the story.
Q: The Publishers Weekly review of the novel says, “Labiner draws implicit connections between the narrator’s and James’s interest in horror, which sheds light on the narrator’s fascinating unreliability.” What do you think of that description?
A: I love it! The Turn of the Screw begins with a ghost story told on Christmas Eve in an old house; what could be more terrifying? The Victorian tale of terror is—in its dark heart—psychological. And Henry James is a psychological writer, right?
Think of the 19th-century world turning modern with gaslight, the telephone, the victrola, moving pictures. The future was a dream and the past was a nightmare; strike that, reverse it. Freud was inventing psychoanalysis; Bram Stoker was writing Dracula.
And now? For us? Even the 20th century has come and gone. And the phone call is still coming from inside the house. In the end all narrators are unreliable, and every story is a ghost story.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A raven has made her home on my roof. She scares away the little birds from the trees. She’s very beautiful. So, I’ll probably write a book that has something to do with Edgar Allan Poe.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m sorry—I’ve gone on and on about Henry James. I’ll just end by saying that there is a movie adaptation of Washington Square. It is called The Heiress, and it stars Montgomery Clift and Olivia de Havilland from—I think—1949. If it comes on television some late night when you can’t sleep, oh! You should watch it. It is sad and strange and really good.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
