Q&A with Fred Waitzkin

 

Photo by Lynn Christoffers

 

 

Fred Waitzkin is the author of the new novel Anything Is Good. His other books include Searching for Bobby Fischer. He lives in Manhattan.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Anything Is Good?

 

A: Ralph Silverman was my best friend in high school. He’s the smartest person I've ever known.

 

In his 20s he was an affluent and highly respected academic philosopher and inventor with a lovely intelligent wife, a fancy car, an attractive Manhattan apartment. Ralph seemed blessed with a star-studded future.

 

But incredibly he lost everything, family, friends, career, home—and by the age of 40 he was living as an outcast on filthy sidewalks in the rain or in abandoned lots in Miami Beach. My best school buddy was a homeless nomad for the next 20 years.

 

There were lengthy periods of time when Ralph and I were out of touch. Several years ago, within months after losing two close friends, I tried to get in touch with Ralph. I didn’t know if he was still alive.

 

I tracked him down in a tiny Section 8 apartment in Ft. Lauderdale. Our phone call turned into scores of phone calls, and he told me one of the most incredible stories I’d ever heard.

    

Q: The writer Geraldine Brooks said your book “offers a deeply affecting dive into the lives of the unhoused. Its shifting perspective and changing narrative voice builds to a clarion call for greater empathy and understanding.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: That Geraldine Brooks was deeply affected by my novel was greatly moving to me and speaks to my own awakening to the tragedy of homelessness in America today.

 

Before I wrote the novel, like many New Yorkers I walked past unhoused sleeping on sidewalks or park benches. I saw them, but not really, as if these people were the discarded furniture of the city.  

        

Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: In the concluding chapters of my novel, my protagonist falls in love with a much younger Asian woman. They spend an unusual but beautiful year living together in Pompano Beach beneath a decaying fishing pier that extends into the Atlantic and reeks of dead horseshoe crabs and fish carcasses tossed down from the pier.

 

In this hidden world Ralph endeavors to teach his girlfriend English. One of the first phrases he teaches her is, “Everything is good.” But when he asks her to repeat the phrase to him, she says, “Anything is good.”

 

He corrects her but later decides that perhaps the way she translates his phrase is more beautiful.

 

Over time beneath the pier Jenny and Ralph create their own personal language and Ralph comes to believe that Jenny understands him more intimately than any of the world’s great philosophers with whom he once debated the deepest meaning of life and language.

 

The title, Anything Is Good, suggests the possibility that a horrible life turn often becomes an unexpected gift. Jenny is certainly a great gift to this brilliant man who has been living woefully on the street for nearly 20 years.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: Witnessing decades of street life through Ralph’s eyes, I met men and women who were true sages. I saw beatings, rape and murder but also scenes of folks falling in love and forming enduring relationships somehow heightened by possessing next to nothing.

 

I learned that visitors from the housed world come to parks and other areas where homeless congregate because the privations of homeless life wear away our pretentions and become a gateway to surprising wisdom.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m not sure what my next book will be. It’s been my experience that once I finish writing a book it’s best for me to take time before plunging into the next one. If I start too soon, I find myself reconceiving chapters that I’ve already written. I need to let the last one drift away for a while.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Anything Is Good is my seventh book. I learned so much writing it. In the past I wrote somewhat intermittently, taking off weekends and going on summer vacations.

 

This book I wrote without a break and at some point the book began writing itself. I would hardly even need to think about what to write next. It just came. But then when I got to the end, I was suddenly gripped by the fear that I didn’t know how to end it.

 

One night as I began to fall asleep I saw the beginning of my next chapter as in a dream. I quickly jotted it down in a little notebook by my bed. For the next several months these dream visions of my concluding chapters came to me at edge of sleep or at the moment I opened my eyes in the morning. It was closest thing to magical writing I’ve ever experienced.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb