March 19, 1933: Author Philip Roth born.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
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Q&A with novelist Jennifer Cody Epstein
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| Jennifer Cody Epstein |
Jennifer Cody Epstein is the author of two novels, The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, which was just released this month, and The Painter from Shanghai. She also has worked as a journalist, and she lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Q: Why did you select the title The Gods of Heavenly Punishment
for your new novel?
A: I chose the novel's title after discovering an old scroll
online by the same name. The scroll is a so-called "Hell Scroll"
painted in the 12th century--it shows the demon Tenkeisei consuming the
ox-headed deity Gozu Tenno. The violence in it is more of the bloody variety
than the fiery, but the title really grabbed me--it seemed to sum up my book's
themes so perfectly. So I have my main character Yoshi thinking about it during
the firebombing, and unconsciously adding flames to the image in it in her
mind.
Q: How did you come up with the array of characters, both
American and Japanese, who are featured in the novel?
A: The characters really came to me piecemeal. I'd initially
conceived of a novel centered mainly around a young girl and her mother (Yoshi
and Hana Kobayashi). But as I researched the bombing I came to realize that
what I really wanted was to explore the event from both American and Japanese
eyes, and so I began to look for other possible characters in the research I
was doing.
I came up with Cam Richards--the doomed, downed bomber pilot
from the Doolittle Raids--after becoming fascinated by that heroic mission; it
seemed an interesting way to bring the aerial perspective in in a somewhat
unexpected way.
Hana Kobayashi came from a memoir I read by an American
journalist who spent 1937 in Tokyo and met a woman very much like the character
I ended up creating--someone equally influenced and shaped by West and East,
and really fitting into neither culture.
I created Yoshi's father, Kenji, as a builder/carpenter
because I wanted someone who would be able to represent Japan's nationalism in
a realistic and understandable way, and also because I wanted to take the novel
to Northern China and the colonies Japan built there during the 1930's and
'40s, since they were in large part the catharsis for the Pacific War for
Japan.
And I included Anton Reynolds after reading about Antonin
Raymond's role in the firebomb testing programs in Utah in 1943--after learning
he'd spent decades in Japan building modern buildings there, then helped the
U.S. military figure out how to destroy the country he'd helped to construct I
realized I just had to get into his head and the complexity of his motivations.
Lastly, Billy Reynolds was a character I'd sort of seen from
the start--an American Occupation soldier who helps to redeem and save Yoshi
after the war. What I hadn't anticipated was connecting him to Anton in that
way, but it made the most sense for continuity to make him Anton's son--and I
liked the added nuance of having him also have a background in Japan before the
war.
Q: How much research did you need to do to write the book?
A: I probably did more research than I had to--it's a bit of
a habit of mine! But I think that's also why I love writing historical
novels--the research part is always so fascinating for me, and really
enriching. I love learning about the things I'm writing about (as opposed to
writing about things I already know about, which I think many writers do).
So I cast a wide net--tons of books, several movies and
documentaries, a trip to Japan to talk to firebombing survivors, a few trips to
aerial museums (some of which very kindly let me climb around in B-25
bombers--so cool!) and the like.
Q: Your first novel, The Painter from Shanghai,
is based on the life of the painter Pan Yuliang. Why did she strike you as a
good subject to write about, and did you consider writing a biography instead
of a novel?
A: Pan was fascinating to me from pretty much the moment I
learned about her, which was at an exhibition at the Guggenheim here in New
York. It was a Modern Chinese Art retrospective, and hers was the first
painting I saw when I walked into the room--a lush, boldly-painted and quite
overtly western-styled self-portrait.
It looked like someone had stuck a Manet or a Van Gogh into
the (very Chinese) mix by mistake, and I immediately went over to check it out.
What I learned about her story--just in that small bio that accompanied the
painting--absolutely stunned me. My first thought was: Why does no one
know about this woman?
And no--I didn't really consider writing a straight
bio--first off because after ten years as a journalist I was really ready to
try to write novels. But also because her story was pretty perfect for
fictionalizing. Not only was it one of those "stranger-than-fiction"
real-life narratives, but there was so little real information about her out
there beside her copious artwork that it left lots of room to imagine and
create. That made it less daunting for me to approach, for some reason.
Q: Are you working on another book now?
A: I'm casting around for my next novel at the moment--I
have several in the running! One is another fictionalized memoir that I may
work on in collaboration with its subject (an extraordinary man who survived
the "child soldier" armies of Uganda), and I've got a joint project
I'm contemplating with my husband that would be an update of a classy, old
mystery novel.
But I'm also preparing (slowly) to plunge back into
Asia--probably somewhere in Southeast Asia this time, but with a more
modern-day twist thrown into it. In short, many balls in the air. We'll see
which lands first!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Q&A with author Gary Krist
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| Gary Krist, photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders |
Gary Krist is the author of five works of fiction and two of non-fiction. His most recent book is City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
Q: How did
you come to focus on the particular time period you examine in City of
Scoundrels, and what was the most important impact on Chicago to come out
of those 12 crucial days?
A: I wanted
to write about a great American city at a critical moment of transition. The evolution of any city, particularly a
city of immigrants like Chicago, invariably involves lots of conflict, with
various ethnic, racial, and class-based groups competing against each other for
power and prominence.
When things
are going well, this kind of competition can work to the city’s advantage,
channeling energies in constructive new directions. But 1919 was one of those times when the
energies of competition turned destructive, and instead of working to build the
city, started tearing it apart. That
notion—of a city suddenly threatened by the same restless dynamism that had
built it in the first place—is what attracted me to this period.
Probably the
most important impact left by those 12 days of conflict was the changed racial
landscape of the city. The riot—really
the first one in which African Americans aggressively fought back when attacked
by whites—marked a moment of arrival for black citizens in Chicago as a
political and social force to be reckoned with.
The violence
on the streets actually galvanized the African-American community to finally
stand up to discrimination and assert their rights as American citizens. On the other hand, the bitterness left by the
riot also ended up hardening the color line that had been developing in the
city during the Great Migration, and left a legacy of residential segregation
in Chicago that persists to this day.
Q: Chicago's then-mayor, William Hale Thompson, was a controversial character,
whom you describe as "the blustering, flamboyant, unscrupulous, but always
entertaining political phenomenon known to all as 'Big Bill.'" What is
Thompson's place in Chicago history?
A: Corruption
existed in Chicago long before Big Bill and continues long after him, but few American
politicians have matched his record of dishonesty and malfeasance. Thompson’s various buffooneries—from his
campaign debate against two caged rats to his well-publicized threats to punch
the King of England in the snoot—all made him an object of some well-deserved
scorn. In fact, historians generally
regard him as one of the worst urban mayors in American history.
But while he
definitely was no Fiorello LaGuardia, I argue in the book that he did have some
virtues. For one thing, he was one of
the first American mayors to bring African Americans into the political process
in significant numbers. Granted, this
was partly self-serving—he and his campaign managers realized, before virtually
anyone else, that blacks could be a powerful voting bloc.
But Thompson
actually did fulfill many of his campaign promises to the community—doubling
the number of African Americans on the police force and naming black leaders to
some important posts in his administration.
And this was at a time when many self-styled good-government types were ignoring
the black community.
Also, as
someone who called himself “Big Bill the Builder,” he really did get a lot of
infrastructure-building done in his three terms. Many of the monuments that make Chicago such
an architectural showplace today—the Michigan Avenue Bridge and the Magnificent
Mile it made possible, Navy Pier, Soldier Field, the numerous broad avenues and
parks—are to a large extent legacies of the Thompson administration, as corrupt
as it was.
As one of Big
Bill’s critics once admitted: “Thompsonism does build roads and bridges, even
if they cost more than they should.”
Q: Your
previous book, The White Cascade, examines a deadly avalanche and
railway disaster in 1910. How did you conduct your research for this book?
A: Since I’m
a narrative historian—with an obligation to keep general readers interested and
turning pages—my goal is to tell the stories of history in as concrete a way as
possible, with plenty of scenes of conflict and interpersonal drama.
But since I
try to hold myself to very strict standards of scholarship, I of course can’t
make anything up. That means I have to
find those scenes in the written historical record, which is why I’m always on
the lookout for memoirs, letters, court transcripts, newspaper interviews—any
kind of source in which a participant in the drama tells exactly what happened when
and how.
For the
avalanche story, there was fortunately a court case that included hundreds of
pages of depositions and testimony from victims and witnesses. I also found a day-by-day diary that had been
kept by one of the passengers, and a long letter written by another passenger
to his mother (both documents were found in the wreckage of the railway train
after the avalanche).
Of course, I
had to read extensively in the secondary literature as well—about everything
from avalanche science to railroad history—but it was mostly in the primary sources
that I found the specific details necessary to bring the whole story to life.
Q: You also
have written three novels and two collections of short stories. Do you prefer
writing either non-fiction or fiction, and if so, why?
A: As you
point out, my work so far has been all over the map. I started my writing career with two
collections of literary short stories, moved on to two thrillers, published a
comic historical novel, and then turned to historical nonfiction narrative with
my last two books. From a branding
perspective, then, I’ve mismanaged my career terribly!
But the
various forms and genres I’ve worked in are not really as different as you
might think. I’ve always considered
myself in the narrative business, whether the narrative is fiction or
nonfiction, short-form or long-form. And
although I’ll probably return to fiction at some point, for the foreseeable
future I’m sticking with my current obsession with history.
Q: What are
you working on now?
A: I’m
working on a book about New Orleans in the 1890-1920 era. I’ll be focusing on a thirty-year conflict
pitting the city’s social and commercial elite against the members of its
various demimondes—prostitutes, jazz musicians, ethnic criminals, etc.
Basically,
it’s the story of how the white establishment in New Orleans tried to “normalize”
the city, to bring it more into line with Southern Protestant ideals of
morality, racial hierarchy, and civic order.
Obviously, things didn’t work out quite as the reformers had hoped, which
is why New Orleans today remains pretty much sui generis.
But for a
while, at least, they successfully suppressed much of what made the city unique
and hard to control. So the new book
will be another story about a great American city in transition, which seems to
be my favorite subject these days.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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