Fox: All books are difficult to write. You have days when you don’t want to go up to your study. When you just feel so defeated and depressed and you don’t know what the hell anything is that you’re looking at and how did you get there. Such a state of confusion. None of it is on a conscious level it seems to me. You go to your study, you sit down and you write. Something happens that sets off a book. There is that first thing. For example, with Poor George, I heard this story from somebody I used to know about a man who took in a boy who stole a radio from him. That was the little seed that Poor George came from. And I constructed all those things. Ernest and George and his wife.
You take in so much of what’s around you. You take in everything. And it’s a matter of what you select to write about. What makes you select it, I don’t know. There’s something about some essential order to things. You read somebody like George Eliot or—Rock Springs for a contemporary example. Those are wonderful stories. Some weren’t so wonderful, but they were perfectly able stories, but some were really wonderful. That’s because they have a kind of wholeness. I didn’t like The Sportswriter very much, it was sort of boring to me, but that was me. I’m not terribly interested in sports. Although I loved watching baseball because of Thomas Wolfe, who wrote about baseball.
I was thinking of C.K. Williams. I love his poetry. I wrote him a fan letter in fact, but now we know each other. And he always looks at me with this tremendous smile of appreciation for my appreciation of his work. Two recent poems knocked me out. There were in the Times Literary Supplement, they were wild poems like Szymborska, you know her?
Rumpus: I love her.
Fox: Oh, I do too. I was one of three judges for the best translator for PEN and I thought, how the hell do you give a prize to a translator. Then I changed my mind when I read Out Stealing Horses which is a wonderful novel by a Norwegian named Per Petterson. And his translator won and he won the Irish Literary Prize. I wander all over the field like a loose horse.
Rumpus: Building a large cast of characters comes unconsciously?
Fox: No, there’s something in us that’s very conscious and it makes these selections. For example, when Otto and Sophie go to the country and on the way there they pass an estate of some kind and Sophie thinks about the rich…all of those things came out of some sense. I don’t think it’s accidental. I think it’s already in one that one is going to take a certain position. And there are thousands of positions you can take, that are available to us, about life. The storytelling stance varies. There’s Patterson writing about out stealing horses. Proust and the madeleine. George Eliot and gambling and Jews. They all write differently. And Richard Ford. Raymond Carver. Who verges on sentimentality here and there for me but some of his stories are wonderful.
(she looks out the window into the backyard) It’s the way light, for example I’m looking at branches now. The light hits the branches on the top, but as the sun drops the light hits differently. It depends upon where you are sitting or standing or lying. How you see that light. There’s a great mystery, one can talk and talk and talk. And yet there’s something elusive about how one really does write. I found after seven semesters at the University of Pennsylvania three or four people who had real voices out of all of them. Dozens of students I had. The others weren’t lacking in other things, but they didn’t have the voice to begin with. The writer’s voice. There are people who practice the violin and don’t have that quality. Asian violinists, young girls seem to have it. Isaac Stern or Jascha Heifetz. It’s a different thing and I don’t feel it’s better. It’s different. We’ve always had storytellers. Primitive fires. Someone would get up and tell a story. It was a magic story very often, about magic things.
Rumpus: Three of the six novels (The Western Coast, The Widow’s Children and The God of Nightmares) have a young woman at the center, seeing what the world is like—the hardships, being privy to all these calculating people who are trying to survive. Why the concentration on this time of life?
Fox: Variations on a theme. The theme is set. Sometimes there are tremendous things that happen to people. Deaths, wars, all kinds of major events in a human life. A building falls down, fires. One changes, but there is the limit to how one changes and the limit is one’s own nature. A
ll these things are somewhat tentative. That’s set from the very beginning. Especially when one is sixteen or seventeen.
I think the only people who don’t really interest me are sociopaths. Because they’re like clocks. They’re set. The springs go a certain way and they can’t vary it. They can’t say I’m sorry or anything like that. They don’t feel anything. So those people are very alien to me.
Rumpus: Awareness is such a concern in these novels. Lies are at the heart of the problems: the lie that Clara’s grandmother has not died in The Widow’s Children and in The God of Nightmares an affair is kept secret for years. These acts are incredibly damaging.
Fox: The narrator of The God of Nightmares passes her hand over her husband in a blessing way, a kind of protective way, she doesn’t even know she’s doing it. After they had that terrible fight. She goes and finds him in the attic. There is the sense that these discoveries bring out the worst and best in us. In the Widow’s Children the mother Laura hasn’t told anyone about her mother’s death out of malice and fear. And Peter Rice thinks about that a lot. He thinks about the writers and claims and carrying on. He thinks about his friend (Clara, Laura’s daughter) a lot, who is not told about her grandmother’s death.
Rumpus: He rights it in the end though. He brings her to the funeral. There’s more triumph to that end than the others.
