Dec. 5

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Dec. 5, 1830: Christina Rossetti born.

Q&A with Janet Todd

Janet Todd is the editor of a new edition of Jane Austen's unfinished novel Sanditon. Todd's other books include The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. A former president of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, she lives in Cambridge, UK, and Venice, Italy.

Q: You write of Sanditon that "the brilliant fragment remains enigmatic from beginning to end." Is it enigmatic mostly because it was unfinished, or are there other reasons?

A: Yes, because unfinished, but Austen lets us see round her endings even of the finished novels. Whatever she had in store for the resort of Sanditon and its shifting inhabitants, I suspect no fate would have been final.

Q: How would you compare Sanditon with Austen's other work?

A: It resembles the juvenile parodies and burlesques more than the finished psychologically subtle novels. It delights in quirks, oddities and snobberies, and in this way is wonderfully relevant to us in the 21st century as we take our selfies and aim to control media presence: the characters in Sanditon try constantly to impose their self-images on others.

Also, where the other novels depict country houses, Sanditon is a novel of seaside tourism.

Q: Do you have ideas about how the book would have turned out if Austen had been able to finish it?

A: In short, no. She supposedly wanted to call it “The Brothers” rather than “Sanditon.” In which case it might have been an interesting break with the other woman-centered novels.

Whatever couples were formed—and as comedy there would need to be a final marriage, presumably of the heroine Charlotte and the most attractive male, Sidney Parker--the fortune of the speculative project of Sanditon would, I suspect, have remained central.

Q: What first intrigued you about Austen's writing and led you to become a scholar of her work?

A: I came to Jane Austen late. She wasn’t a childhood favourite. As I worked on other, then fairly unknown, writers of her time, I found myself going to Austen for comparison. Increasingly I admired and was amazed at her skill, her succinctness, her combination of wit and realism. I now think her unequalled.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I have just finished a novel called Don’t You Know There’s a War On? (due out May 2020). Its energetically angry central character lives through the Second World War and into England’s diminished post-war reality. Her life—and that of her only daughter-- unravels behind the closed velvet curtains of suburbia.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I wish I’d started publishing novels earlier! At 77 I must rush to make up for lost time.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Janet Todd.

Dec. 4

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Dec. 4, 1835: Samuel Butler born.

Q&A with Niall Williams

Niall Williams is the author of the new novel This Is Happiness. His many other books include History of the Rain and Four Letters of Love. He lives in County Clare, Ireland.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for This Is Happiness, and for your character Noel Crowe?

A: I never know where an idea comes from. I generally only start with a sentence, and see where that leads.

But, having moved with my wife Christine to the west of Ireland in the mid-1980s—an account of which became the first of our four non-fiction books, O Come Ye Back, published in New York by Soho Press—I was struck by the fact that people could remember The Day the Electricity Came.

And this seemed to me a threshold time in Irish life, when, halfway into the 20th century, the west of Ireland was still living in the 19th.  

Q: The novel features your protagonist as an older man looking back at himself at 17. Why did you decide to structure the book that way?

A: I didn’t want to write a “historical” or period novel as such, by just setting it in the ‘50s.

I think many of us also have a time in our youth, maybe a very brief time like a summer or a few weeks when we were first most alive, or, as the narrator says, first discovered what it meant to be a fully human being, by which I think he means to have encountered the twin polarities of love and death.

Also, of course, I am an old man myself, and know something of what it feels like to be looking back at a raw younger self.

Q: The book begins with the line "It had stopped raining." What role do you see the rain playing in the novel?

A: So many people have asked me after reading my previous novels, “Does it really rain that much in Ireland?”—to which my answer is generally yes.

And now this question about the stopping of the rain pops up. For me, as for the narrator, it first signals just “something is happening,” something has changed.

But because of the angle of the narrative, where there is this mythic or fable quality, as is fitting for most of our pasts I think, the stopping of the rain, whether real or imagined in recall, has an element of taking the story outside of time. The book takes place literally between two drops of rain.

Q: Did you need to do much research to recreate the time period featured in the book?

A: No, not a lot. As I said, I benefitted enormously from hearing firsthand stories of people who had lived through the rural electrification, which was a huge effort and event in Ireland. This was the principal research. I also read the history book mentioned in the acknowledgements.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I am in the foothills of a new novel, like the previous two, also set in Faha. I don’t seem able to leave.

But besides that, Christine and I are working on a new non-fiction book about our life in County Clare. Next year we will be here 35 years, and we have returned to writing about the way we have been living, tending the garden and trying to take care of the little piece of earth we are charged with minding, recognizing the importance of this when the picture of the larger Earth, with a capital E, is so gloomy.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: It’s raining.  

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Dec. 3

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Dec. 3, 1895: Anna Freud born.

Q&A with Julie Valerie

Julie Valerie is the author of the new novel Holly Banks Full of Angst, the first in her Village of Primm series. She lives in Virginia.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for your novel, and for your character Holly?

A: Much of my inspiration comes from being a mom and experiencing all of the wild and wonderful zaniness that Mom Life brings. Holly is close to my heart because she tries so hard to succeed amid women she perceives to be more accomplished at motherhood than she is.

But what Holly Banks fails to realize is this: we're all trying our hardest in this high-stakes game called motherhood. Most of us, like Holly, are "less-than-perfect moms searching for mostly happy in a pretty good life."

Q: The novel is set in the Village of Primm. What inspired you to create Primm?

A: The Village of Primm juxtaposes the conventional with the absurd. Through humor with touches of satire, I've mapped a village to play "home" to the aspirations we carry within us.

I was inspired to create the Village of Primm, and, to a lesser extent, neighboring Southern Lakes, to explore societal ideals and the tensions caused by those societal ideals.

I'm always curious to learn from my readers where they'd most want to live: in the aspirational Village of Primm, despite its high price, both literally and figuratively or Southern Lakes, where life isn't as picturesque but a lot more relaxed? 

Q: What do you think the novel says about trying to be perfect?

A: I think the novel presents a unique and compelling picture of the pursuit of perfection and the costs associated with that pursuit.

Told with humor and poignancy, I employ satire, allegory, and other literary devices to tell a tale of modern motherhood through the lens of a less-than-perfect mom, newly moved to a picturesque village, where established rules and hierarchies all point to the town and its inhabitants’ "true north": the pursuit of perfection; perfect families in perfect homes attending a perfect school in a perfect village.

Impossible to achieve? Of course. But, hopefully, my readers will enjoy the many ways the quirky residents of the Village of Primm attempt to answer the call.

Q: What are some of your favorite novels?

A: My reading tastes are broad and eclectic, but there is a thread through.

First, I'm inspired by inventive storytelling, from the multifaceted S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst to the contemporary telling of Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple.

Second, I admire the masters of their genre, in particular, the trailblazing work of Jane Austen and her "study of manners" told through irony, realism, and satire.

Third, I'm awed by series fiction authors and the sustained commercial appeal of their work. I'm awed by creators of binge-worthy, television series. And I love reading scripts like Downton Abbey, trying to crack the code that underlies different forms of writing and storytelling.

And four, I greatly admire Helen Fielding for creating a character so iconic that character became a literary archetype. I mean, come on. How cool is THAT?

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Currently, I'm working on Book Two in the Village of Primm series, due to my publisher a week before the pub date for Book One.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I love connecting with my readers through my once-monthly author newsletter, the primary source for the inside scoop into my writing life and the world inside my books.

In my newsletters, I give readers a glimpse of life in the Village of Primm through character gossip and village happenings. Expect a magazine-style mashup of favorite things. Seasonal features. Home decor. Specialty drinks. Color and trend forecasts. 

Learn more here.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Dec. 2

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Dec. 2, 1958: George Saunders born.