An interview with a Spanish journalist:
1. In June 1999, you were selected by The New Yorker magazine as one of the 20 american writers for the 21st Century. Do you think there’s any literary link between all these authors? Do you recognize a generational connection among them all?
The one thing I noticed about that group is that, like the rest of that generation, we all know and love pop culture. There was nobody I met who was a Luddite or who hadn’t sort of wallowed in TV and movie culture as a kid — I think I expected that at least a few of those writers would be eggheaded, isolated, etc, but no. So I suspect that if there is anything linking these writers, it is this post-modern sensibility — the knowledge of irony etc. Some of them respond to this by writing very realistically and so forth, but I would argue that even that realism is laced with an understanding of the storyness of stories — that there are multiple ways of telling them.
2.
Pastoralia, your last book, came out not a long before the events of September 11th. After these events, would you now change or correct anything in your book if you had this chance?
Not really. I mean, as horrible as September 11 was, it was not the first horror, or the last, and so the job of looking intensely at the human heart to see what in the world is wrong with it is more valid than ever. I hope that my book is seen as an attempt to look, with love, at human foibles — our greed and self-centeredness and so on. To write it, I had to look at these things as they manifest in myself. And I’m not sure that fiction is meant to respond to, or avert, or explain, events — I think of it more as a meditative act, that benefits the writer and (maybe) the reader — so it’s moral effect, if any, is humble but real.
One of the dangers, in my opinion, is that Americans may make of Sept 11 “the horror” instead of “a horror”....and in the process, fail to broaden our understanding of history. I think we should take all the pathos and horror and true pity that that day inspired, and turn it outwards towards all of those who are suffering, dying, disempowered, humiliated. Even the terrorists themselves, as much as this is possible. Otherwise it risks becoming an even worse tragedy, that makes us more insular, even paranoid.
I think this is true on a smaller scale — say a person loses a family member to a violent criminal act. Some people become bitter and terrified, others become more open and aware, and develop a resolve that this should never happen again. Which is better? Which really is more effective at eliminating the root cause of the horror?
3.
American society in the present days is one of the main subjects of “Pastoralia”, so to speak. What’s your overview of the American society? Do you think the rest of the world can share this point of view?
I think America, like everything else, is both holy and flawed at once: a beautiful display, potentially dangerous. American is a big muscular guy gleaming in the sun, powerful, impressive to look at, a guy who, unfortunately, has never been away from home — or (to mix my metaphors) America is a bull in a china shop except that, being an American bull in a china shop, it doesn’t know it is in a china shop, and doesn’t speak the language being spoken in the china shop, and so speaks English louder to make itself understood, while breaking everything. So that, to me, is America: A big gleaming beautiful muscular bull shouting in English in a china shop. What I think America needs to do is get a vision of itself that is worthy of its power — to do less gathering and flexing and feathering of its own nest, and become committed to using its power for good. Mostly, of course, I love America, because it’s really the only place I know, and so, when I say I love America, I mean I love life. To the rest of the world, I would simply say: America is not her government.
4.
In aesthetic and stylistic terms, what’s your opinion on the so-called “dirty realism?” And X-Generation?
I’m not sure — I try not to think in those terms, because then you are limited by ideas of genre and so on. I think any literary niche can be traced back to the beginnings of literature (for example, do they get any more metafictional than Lawrence Sterne, any more “magical realist” than Cervantes)...so every literary school is just a mapping from the timeless human mind. Beloved writers are just those who embody, very purely, some particular part of our humanness. So Turgenev was a dirty realist and Kerouac was a GenX nihilist etc etc.
5.
Which are the literary influences you recognize?
Well, in terms of real influences — who I had read and loved by the time I started writing — I would have to list Hemingway, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Jack Kerouac, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Kurt Vonnegut, Tobias Wolff. Also performers like Monty Python, Steve Martin. Crazy and funny family members. The cartoonist Charles Schultz.
