Adam Haslett’s first book of short stories, You Are Not a Stranger Here, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Haslett received the 2003 PEN/Winship Award for the best book by a New England author, as well as a PEN/Malamud Award for accomplishment in short fiction in 2006.
His debut novel, Union Atlantic, anticipated much of the recent financial crisis, capturing through its well-drawn characters an intimate vision of the moral trajectory of a country in which such massive public deception and private irresponsibility could take place. Union Atlantic is due out in paperback on February 8th.
BW: I understand you’ll be teaching at the California College of the Arts for the spring semester. Do you like teaching?
AH: I do. It’s a hard thing – the hardest thing to teach is to get writers, young writers, to hear their own work as opposed to just see it on the page. So whenever I do teach, I’m trying to come up with ways to get writers to think about the aural quality of the work, because I think it’s much easier to talk about plot and characterization than it is to talk about the rhythm of prose.
BW: When did you know you were a writer, and after that, what did you do to become a good writer?
AH: The first writing I did was writing in journals; it was entirely personal, but it was something I did a lot of. It wasn’t until early in college that I tried to write something fictional. I don’t know if there was a particular moment when I thought, oh, I am a writer. I think there were moments where I got some confidence that this was something I could keep doing, but I can’t think of a particular moment when I had a sense of that. In fact, I’m sometimes capable still of thinking that I won’t write again.
In terms of becoming better, it’s such a slow process. But I think while you spend lots of time thinking your work isn’t very good – you need to work harder, or you’re frustrated with it, or you want to throw it out – at the same time I think that when you’re finished, the hope is that you actually think it’s really good. And it may be that a couple years later you think, oh, that wasn’t so good. But I think it’s important to be able to arrive at some confidence about work as you go along, otherwise you might lose hope if you don’t, at least at some point along the way, appreciate elements of what you’re doing.
BW: You said (in a talk at UMass-Boston) that the writer is constantly in a play between doubt and recovery.
AH: I often have to overcome doubt about the usefulness – usefulness is a bad word – but the doubt about the value of writing before I ever sit down. That’s sometimes a high hurdle, particularly when you’re beginning something. In some way that just gets worked into your career as you go along, the older you get.
I think there is an analogy, however imperfect, to faith. That the deepest believers are the ones that wrestle with doubt. The people who are cheerfully believing the whole way through may not have the deepest faith at other times. To have faith in a religion, or to practice something, means wrestling with it. It means, in a way, being constantly prickled by it, not simply comforted at all times by it.
BW: I won’t quote you back to yourself too much, but I heard you say on NPR that the idea of the novelist in the world, trying to tackle the complexity of contemporary life, is something that you take seriously. So, in spite of the doubt, there’s also a belief in the importance of what you’re doing.
AH: I’ve always been something of a political junkie, and just always interested in world events, in what’s going on around me. The books that excited me were books that put the more psychologically nuanced investigation of character into a context of some larger, social forces, but without sacrificing that nuance of character. So that was an ambition that I had for a novel, which I think is one of the reasons that it took me a while to write. It’s very different from short stories, just by definition – it’s more difficult for them to be broad in scope. It’s sort of a combination of intellectual interests, and feeling that fiction is actually the most satisfying way to get at those interests.
BW: How do you feel, having completed Union Atlantic, and now embarking on new projects?
AH: Basically, good. I feel as though the readers have responded to that combination of the larger social forces and character. I think whenever you write a book there’s a way in which you’re reinventing yourself as a writer. So, on the one hand I feel good about Union Atlantic, but also it feels at this point kind of far back, since I finished it a while ago. I’m here to write in a different way again.
BW: I understand you meditate before writing each day.
AH: Yeah, in the past I’ve usually done it right before writing. Lately, I just do it in the morning. It’s not necessarily associated with the writing. It has broader implications than just me being able to work. I find meditation to be a profound thing. I think a lot of writing is being able to trust and listen to the voices and intuitions in yourself that are easily crowded out by the mass of distraction that we have, the volume of the rest of the culture. In order to cultivate those quieter voices in yourself, or those half-glimpsed ideas, you have to take some measures to quiet the mind, because we’re over-stimulated. Meditation is something that certainly does allow that quieting.
BW: You spent the first few years of your life in Kingston, MA, and then went to high school in Wellesley. Do you think of yourself as a New England writer, and what does that mean?
AH: It’s definitely where I’m from. My mother’s side of the family had long been settled around there. I think with the settled-ness of that part of the world, I think that region does have a somewhat different feel to it than a lot of other parts of the country. I’m kind of half-English as well, and spent some time going to school there. In that way I feel sort of transatlantic. I don’t think you can avoid the impress of your own childhood on yourself, so it’s naturally a setting for things, and I think it can be a rich one.
BW: How did you come to set Union Atlantic in New England?
AH: Pretty organic really. I was writing about Charlotte Graves, and she’s a New England character, so it seemed like the book wanted to be there. Also, I live in New York and I know New York very well, but I think there’s a way in which, if I were to set a banking book in New York, that New York would sort of demand that much more space to be its own character. In a sense I didn’t want the distraction of New York.
BW: I found the character of Nate, from Union Atlantic, to be really compelling. Of the four main characters he’s the one still developing and making changes in his life. But I heard you say elsewhere that the novel’s concept began with the other three main characters. How did Nate enter the story?
AH: Well, he’s the last one to come into focus. I knew that there was this male teenage character, but I had various backgrounds for him. I wrote a fair amount with him as someone coming from the Midwest, who arrives East and somehow meets Charlotte. It didn’t really seem to work for me. Eventually, I decided that he was going to be one of the most autobiographical characters that I’ve written, and so this high school set of friends that he pals around with – I just drew on a lot of my own experiences. That was also a letting down of a barrier, and a letting go of shame. And just writing sympathetically about someone in that predicament of innocence and longing and confusion.
BW: How different did it feel, sharing Union Atlantic with book tour audiences as opposed to You Are Not a Stranger Here?
AH: I read from different sections in order not to become entirely bored. There is obviously a satisfaction in reading an entire short story that you don’t get with a section of a novel. I like reading – part of that interest in the rhythm of prose is an interest in being able to speak in the rhythm that I wrote it in.
I think writers going into the world with their books – there’s a kind of confusion about that. Unlike a musician, whose performance is the art itself, there’s really no necessity for an author to meet the reader. The ideal moment is the reader with the book alone. So it’s fun for me to read sometimes, but I think there’s a kind of dissociation that can arise, because I don’t think readers quite know what they want from an author and I don’t think authors quite know what they want from an audience.
BW: What are you reading now?
AH: I’m reading “In Memoriam,” the Tennyson poem. I’ve been reading E.L. Doctorow’s The March. I just finished C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, a memoir about losing his wife. I’m reading a book that’s going to be coming out in a couple months called How to Write a Sentence, by Stanley Fish, which is kind of fun. And I’ve been reading a lot of political speeches. I’ve been reading a book called Lincoln at Gettysburg, by Garry Wills, which is interesting.
BW: Is that part of your study of the rhythms of speech and rhetoric?
AH: Yes, indeed. I’m looking at how you write when you know that you are going to deliver the words, and the point of the delivery is to compel and convince. So of course there are a lot of classical rhetorical devices, certain kinds of repetition, certain kinds of patterning that come into political speech and sermons. Also the need for the memorable line: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” “The better angels of our nature.” The finely wrought line, those are things in which that form, I think, has stuff to teach fiction writers. Of course, that would generally be thought of as a heretical statement because the last thing you’re supposed to do in fiction is preach. But I think there’s something to be said for studying people who know they have an audience.
BW: Do you think, at this stage in your career, about improving as a writer? Are you still developing?
AH: Yeah, I think you always have to be. I think of it probably, in a somewhat Romantic vein, as the gaining of access to things in one’s self, which means the lowering of barriers to get to those things. The overcoming of shame would be high on that list. There’s a great quote in the C.S. Lewis I mentioned, from A Grief Observed:
“I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.”
And I think that’s probably true.
BW: You’ve said you feel like a pessimist among optimists in the US and an optimist among pessimists in Britain. Where do you locate yourself in the land of publishing right now?
AH: I feel quite fortunate to feel well supported by a publisher and to have people interested in my work. I think agents and people who work in publishing know more than I do, in terms of how the business is going. The publishing business always thinks that it’s dying, so that creates a certain background atmosphere. It’s not a business full of optimists. Whether that’s much more real now, because of digital, I suppose it is. But I never began doing this because of money. And I don’t think the practice, the interest in reading serious fiction among some number of people, is going anywhere. What that means about how writers live and what goes on – I don’t know. But I think there are a lot of people who are hungry for the connection that they get by having experience clarified in words. So I feel lucky to have been able to do that as long as I have and to have readers who respond to it and want to read more.