Friday, May 31, 2013

Obituary / Franca Rame

Dario Fo and Franca Rame

Franca Rame obituary

Leading Italian actor, playwright and militant leftwing politician who was the wife and professional partner of Dario Fo
Franca Rame
In 2006 Franca Rame surprised everyone by standing for parliament. Photograph: Mondadori/Getty Images
Franca Rame, who has died aged 84, was one of Italy's most admired stage performers and playwrights. A leftwing militant, she was elected to the Italian senate in 2006 but resigned within two years, saying the assembly was an icebox of feelings. But Rame was best known as the wife and professional partner of the actor-playwright Dario Fo. In spite of their ups and downs, which they themselves pilloried in a one-act play, Coppia Aperta (The Open Couple, 1982), she remained at his side on stage and off. When Fo received the Nobel prize for literature in 1997, he called Rame his muse and shared the medal with her.
Rame was born in Parabiago, Milan. Her mother, Emilia, was a teacher and a strict Catholic; her father, Domenico, was an actor and socialist militant. She grew up against the God-fearing background of convent schools and the contrasting world of barnstorming theatricals and progressive politics. She made her first appearance on stage in her mother's arms, when she was eight days old. At the age of 18, she began to work in theatres in Milan and had an immediate success in revue. After a few years, she found herself in the same company as Fo, who thought her beyond his reach. She, however, felt attracted to this drab-looking, lanky young man. One evening, she pushed him against a wall backstage and kissed him.


They married in 1954 and their son, Jacopo, was born the following year. Rame and Fo formed a company with other cabaret talents, and she appeared in several films, only one of which is worth remembering – Lo Svitato (The Screwball, 1956), directed by Carlo Lizzani. Fo, who also starred and co-wrote the script, was praised as a promising, Tati-like comedian and she too got good reviews, but the film was a flop and they focused instead on the theatre, which was already offering greater satisfaction. Her lively comedic sense matched her engaging stage presence, so there was always a role for her in Fo's shows, first in cabaret and then in his full-length plays, such as their first hit, Gli Arcangeli non Giocano a Flipper (Archangels Don't Play Pinball), staged in 1959 at one of Milan's largest theatres, the Odeon, where they were to do a new play each season for years to come. Political satire became increasingly prevalent.
In 1962, Fo and Rame were signed as guest stars in co-authored sketches in a popular TV variety show, Canzonissima, but after a few weeks the couple walked out, refusing to accept censorship of their politically slanted jibes. They did not reappear on Italian TV for 15 years, returning instead to the theatre with one of Fo's most successful shows, Isabella, Tre Caravelle e un Cacciaballe (Isabella, Three Sailing Ships and a Con Man), set in Spain in the early years of the inquisition, in which Rame played Queen Isabella, one of her most scintillating performances. There were inevitable topical parallels with the clerically governed Italy of the 1960s.


In 1968, as the movement of dissent in Paris and the US spread to Italy, the pair abandoned the commercial theatre and the financial guarantees that came with their annual seasons, preferring to form a new co-operative group. At first they performed under the auspices of the Communist party, which Rame had joined in; even if Fo's sympathies were closer to the more extreme leftist groups. They played to enthusiastic audiences of mainly workers and students. When I interviewed Fo and Rame for a BBC Arena documentary in 1984, she described how they performed for the workers of a glass factory that was about to close. They arranged for 10,000 glasses to be put on sale at the venue, and the proceeds helped to save the factory.
Franca Rame, left, with her husband Dario Fo
Franca Rame, left, with her husband Dario Fo playing Silvio Berlusconi in his satirical play The Two-Headed Anomaly. Photograph: Alessandra Tarantino/AP


In 1970 they co-founded their own militant theatre group, La Comune, in Milan. She did agitprop pieces such as Fedayin (1971), the takings from which went to the Palestinian Liberation Front. She and Fo based La Comune in the Palazzina Liberty, an abandoned pavilion that became a magnet for Milan's leftist community. There, she starred in Fo's Non Si Paga, Non Si Paga! (Can't Pay? Won't Pay!) as a typical proletarian housewife who leads other women to go looting at the supermarkets. It was Fo's first strictly feminist play and its success encouraged her to write her own sketches, on which he usually collaborated. In 1977 she put the sketches together into a one-woman show, Tutta Casa, Letto e Chiesa (It's All Bed, Board and Church). It became a favourite text for feminist theatre groups and was performed (as Female Parts) by Yvonne Bryceland at the National Theatre in London in 1982.
In 1973 Rame was kidnapped and raped by fascists. Ten years later, she used the experience for a monologue, Lo Stupro (The Rape), which featured in a 1983 workshop she did at the Riverside Studios in London. She caused controversy when she gave a surprise performance of the monologue on a popular family TV programme in Italy. In 1987 she announced on TV that she and Fo were separating. However, they managed to patch up their relationship.
Through the organisation Soccorso Rosso (Red Aid), Rame raised funds to help the families of political prisoners, who were being mistreated in Italian jails. She said in 1984: "I'm not defending prisoners because I think they're poor helpless beings who have been maltreated by an evil society. I just want to defend their right to dignified human treatment." This kind of activity made it difficult for her and Fo to get visas to visit the US, but they eventually travelled there, to a triumphant reception in theatres and universities, in the late 1980s.
In the 90s, Jacopo helped his parents adapt his book Zen and the Art of Fucking as a monologue for Rame, who called it "a comic lesson in love and sexual education". The title was changed to "Sex? Yes please, my pleasure" to appease eventual bigots who anyway tried unsuccessfully to stop its performances at the Milan Piccolo Teatro. Just as audiences in the post cold war world were perhaps beginning to tire of the political theatre genre, Fo's Nobel prize brought him and Rame back into the limelight. They gave most of the Nobel money to charity. At the Stockholm ceremony they, accompanied by Jacopo, seemed a distinguished bourgeois family being received by royalty rather than the band of anarchists of their public image. It was endearing without seeming incongruous or hypocritical. They had a right to feel pleased with themselves.
Fo and Rame continued to do plays, including L'Anomalo Bicefalo (The Two-Headed Anomaly, 2003) – not perhaps one of Fo's masterpieces but a timely and witty fantastical satire about a political rally in Sicily, where there is an assassination attempt on Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi. The latter recovers when surgeons give him what is left of Putin's brain. Berlusconi's then wife, Veronica, played by Rame, has to explain to him who he was, with hilarious results. The real Veronica saw the play and complimented Rame, much to Berlusconi's dismay.
In 2006, Rame surprised everyone by standing for parliament. She was elected to the senate for the Italia dei Valori (Italy of Values) party of Berlusconi's enemy, the former magistrate Antonio Di Pietro. When she resigned, she ran notices in Italian newspapers to explain why she felt frustrated by the experience. "This has been the most strenuous and hard-going period of my life," she wrote. In the summer of 2006, Rame appeared on stage in Verona in Fo's Peace Mom, dedicated to Cindy Sheehan's protest after her son's death as a US soldier in Iraq.
In her later years, she helped to preserve Fo's archives and to stage his public performances devoted to artists including Caravaggio. In 2009, Fo published a biography of Rame and she acted with him in a play about Aurelius Ambrosius, the patron saint of Milan, to whom they also dedicated a handsome book. They had been due to appear in a new collaboration, Una Callas Dimenticata (A Forgotten Callas), at the Arena in Verona this summer.
She is survived by Dario and Jacopo.
• Franca Rame, actor and playwright, born 18 July 1928; died 29 May 2013



http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/may/29/franca-rame



Thursday, May 30, 2013

Tom Junod / The Falling Man / 10 Years Later

falling man photograph 9 11
Photo by Richard Drew

Surviving the Fall

Ten years later, putting the Falling Man to rest.
by Tom Junod
Esquire, September 9, 2011, 5:38 PM

The tooth came last. It came home two years ago, and once it did Eulogia Hernandez knew that the rest of her husband Norberto would never follow. She knew that he was gone because she knew that he was complete, and she could finally stop dreaming of his return.
It was the dream that had kept her alive, in the days after Norberto disappeared when the buildings fell down, and it was the dream that had started killing her in the years since she and her three daughters had began returning pieces of him to the grave in Puerto Rico. All she had ever wanted — the only mercy she had ever asked for — was the knowledge that her husband was trying to come home when he died, that he was trying to reach her and the girls. That's why they suffered so when that newspaper reporter looked at that terrible picture of the man falling through the sky and said that the man was Norberto. The man in that photo wasn't trying to come home. He was falling. The man in that photo wasn't Norberto.
Eulogia feared for her sanity, when people kept saying that it was — that she didn't know what she knew. Her daughters, too. The youngest, Tatiana, was fifteen at the time. She began hearing voices, because she began listening to the people who said that her father was the man in the picture. "I thought it was true," she says now. "It looked like him, with the uniform and everything. So I didn't know who to believe, who to trust. I didn't know who was who, and if I could believe my own family..."
It got better, after it was proven that the newspaper reporter made a mistake — after, in the words of Tatiana's older sister Catherine, "my father's name was cleared." And it got better when they began bringing Norberto back home to Puerto Rico. "It sounds morbid," says Catherine, "but we have him almost complete. We have his legs, we have his skull, his torso, and an arm. And it means a lot to us, because he's there. We alternate every year, at the anniversary — one year in New York, at Ground Zero, and one year in Puerto Rico. This year, it's New York. But when we go to New York, it's out of respect for my father and for the others who died. When we go to Puerto Rico, it's for comfort. There is much more comfort in the place where he's at rest than in the place where he was killed."
And yet even when Norberto began going home to Puerto Rico, Eulogia couldn't let go of the dream that he still might go home to her. "My mother couldn't talk about him, and you couldn't talk to her," Tatiana says. "She would get so emotional. She was stuck in her own little world. She kept wondering, 'What if he's lost somewhere? What if he's wandering the streets and doesn't know he is?' The false hope of him coming home was driving her crazy."
The tooth lifted the curse, even more than the article in Esquire that said he wasn't the man in the picture, the Falling Man. After the tooth was sent to her two years ago, she decided to talk to someone — to do what she'd always refused to do, and get help. She even called Norberto's sister, to tell her that the last of her brother had made it home. She hadn't spoken to Norberto's sister in eight years. She hadn't spoke to her since Norberto's sister had responded to the newspaper reporter's entreaties, had looked at the picture of the Falling Man that had been proffered to her and had said, "Yes, that's my brother. That's Norberto." Now Eulogia called her about the tooth, and kept calling her until, as Catherine says, "little by little, they came back together. They reconciled. They don't talk all the time, like they used to, but they talk. My father's sister is my aunt again."
They brought the tooth down to Puerto Rico last year, and buried it with the rest of Norberto Hernandez, in the place where he was born. And now they are what Norberto wanted them to be, together. They all live in the Long Island town where they moved after 9/11, Eulogia living in the same house with Tatiana and Jackie, her oldest daughter, and Jackie's five children; and around the block from Catherine, who's married with two kids of her own. Jackie's a doctor's assistant, studying to become a nurse; Catherine's a police officer in Queens; and Tatiana's studying to become a commercial pilot on Long Island after putting aside her dream to join the Air Force — after realizing that she could never leave her mother, or her sisters, or the memory of Papi.
Are they healed? They are not, even though Eulogia can now whisper on the phone that "I accept the reality that I am here alone with my three daughters." For one thing, they still do not think that the photograph that Richard Drew took of the Falling Man should ever have been published. "I won't look at it," Catherine says. "For the families, it should have been kept in a vault, kept for themselves. And I think that every family would agree. It's a horrific image. The first time I saw it, my heart dropped; I literally felt sick to my stomach. To think that someone had to go through that. And then when people started saying that the man in the photo was my father..."
For another, they believe that they are expected to feel different somehow, with the arrival of the tenth anniversary. They do not feel different. "The tenth feels the same as the ninth, feels the same as the eighth," Catherine says. "And it all feels the same as the day after. My father's gone, and he's never coming back. That's what it feels like."
They do not feel comforted by what is supposed to comfort them — by the completion of the memorial and the construction of another tower in the place where the towers fell — for what the world regards as an act of memory, the Hernandezes regard as the start of the inevitable forgetting. "I personally disagree with them building another building there," Jackie says. "I personally feel that that piece of land should be sacred, that they should build a cemetery and leave it alone. But nobody cares what the families say, to be honest with you. They do what they want to do. The government doesn't take us into consideration for anything. Their consideration is getting the finances back up. It's beyond painful. They build again, and God forbid there's another attack. Then what? They should just leave it alone. Just leave it alone."
*****
Courtesy of the Smithsonian Museum

Jonathan Briley's pager is supposed to be getting back home soon.
Gwendolyn Briley Strand works in Washington, D.C. — what she calls "the epicenter of memorials" — and knows what cold comfort memorials bring. "They're never the way that the families, the grieving people, deal with their loss," she says. "They're the way the world deals with its loss. They're not for us. They're for the rest of the country, and they're for history."
Nevertheless, Gwendolyn is going to be in New York with her family on Sunday, to see the memorial, and to hear, once again, the reading of the name of her brother Jonathan. "I've gone every year," she says, "because of the feeling that's there, among the families. You know, everyplace I go, if I tell people I lost someone on 9/11, I hear the same thing: 'Oh, you're the first person I've met who has.' Well, at Ground Zero, everyone's lost someone. It's the only place I can go where I'm not the odd man out."
And yet there's something that distinguishes Gwendolyn from all the other grieving family members who will observe the tenth anniversary of the attacks on Sunday morning — the fact that her brother, Jonathan, has been made to stand for all. She and her family have changed places with the Hernandezes; the same Esquire article that "cleared" Norberto Hernandez of being the Falling Man made the provisional case that it was Jonathan Briley. The memorial that will stand for all the others murdered that day is on the ground; the memorial for Jonathan is in the sky, or in the infinitely replicable pixels of a digital photograph.
"The first time I looked at that photograph, it took my breath away," she says. "Now I am quite at peace with it not being Jonathan."
You see, she has Jonathan, in the same way that the Hernandezes have Norberto; and at the same time she knows that no one does. A few days after the attacks, her father, the Rev. Alexander Briley of the Shiloh Baptist Church in New Rochelle, made, for the first time in his life, a public demand of God. He demanded that God restore his son to him — that God deliver the miracle that would deliver to him a body to bury. God answered his furious prayer; and from the dust and the rubble came what Gwendolyn calls "Jonathan's full form." Afterwards, Reverend Briley used to say that God gave him exactly the miracle he asked for, but he asked for the wrong one. He should have asked for the return of Jonathan, alive.
Now Jonathan is buried in Mt. Kisco, next to his mother, who died in 2009. But Gwendolyn doesn't visit him there, because he is not there, any more than he is there in Richard Drew's photograph. "I believe in the trinity of the human being — mind, body and spirit. And I know that after the death of the body, he's not there. He's in God's hands."
In the same way, he's not in the photograph of the Falling Man. "People have to get over wondering who this man was," she says. "He's everybody. We're so stuck on who he was that we can't see what's right there in front of us. The photo's so much bigger than any man, because the man in the photo is clearly in God's hands. And it's God who gives us the grace to go on."
Gwendolyn does wonder, however, about her father. Reverend Briley was diagnosed with Parkinson's shortly after the death of his wife, and the disease has progressed rapidly. "He hasn't been out of bed in a year, and I'm not sure if he knows what's happening on Sunday. But maybe that's another of God's mercies. I think of Jonathan dying at forty-three, and then my father getting to this stage in his life. Which is the better way? Jonathan's death took so much out of my father. Maybe it's good where he is right now."
As for Jonathan, he is everywhere, and he belongs to everybody. "They recovered some of his personal effects, and they're at the Smithsonian," Gwendolyn says. "I have the bracelet he wore that day. But they have his pager, his ID card, and his keys. And they have gone all over the world, in a traveling exhibition. It started here, in Washington. But it's traveled all over the world. It's supposed to be getting back home soon. Maybe it already has."

http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/the-falling-man-10-years-later-6406030


mad men falling man photo

Falling (Mad) Man

Is the poster for the new season of Mad Men a desecration? Or just how we continue to reckon with 9/11?
by Tom Junod
Esquire, January 30, 2012

On September 11, 2001, Richard Drew took a picture. He was a photographer for the Associated Press, and he'd been dispatched to downtown New York, where the twin towers of the World Trade Center were on fire — were, indeed, already ruins, even before they fell. When he staked out his place near the police perimeter, however, Drew focused not on the fire but on the falling. People were jumping out of the towers in droves, and after they jumped, they fell. Drew pointed his lens at them and followed them down. He shot them en masse and he shot them individually, and at 9:41 AM he shot a man in a white shirt and black pants tumbling in the air, scrambling in the air, but appearing to manage one blessed moment of consonance before completing his fall out of the camera's view. This photograph — the photograph of a man falling 1,000 feet headfirst somehow righting himself before joining the ruin — is the photograph that appeared the next day in the New York Times and in newspapers all over the world. It had no title, and after readers protested its publication, it was withdrawn from view.
Six years later, AMC broadcast the first episode of its drama about the Golden Age of Madison Avenue, Mad Men. The title sequence portrayed a man — the stark silhouette of a man — in a suit and a tie, falling from the window of an office tower. Was the image a reference to Drew's photograph? Absolutely. Did the entire show exist within the peculiar set of quotation marks that 9/11 furnished, and travel back 50 years in order to reckon obliquely with the last ten? It did, which accounts for the almost forensic nature of our fascination with it. The show doesn't merely begin with a sequence portraying a man's fall. The show begins with a man's fall to tell us that it's about a man's fall — to tell us that as it begins, it will also end.
And now AMC stands weirdly accused of making reference to 9/11, in its promotional poster for Mad Men's fifth season, set to commence on Sunday, March 25. On the one hand, the poster is merely a continuation of the art that has accompanied the show since its inception — a bit of shorthand that refers as much to the viewing public's impatience to get Mad Men back after its extended hiatus as it does to the existential consequences of Dick Whitman impersonating a dead man named Don Draper. At the same time, the poster dispenses with the corporate context specific to Mad Men, indeed with context altogether, and, by concentrating on one falling man, seems out to remind viewers that the show is really about the Falling Man... that for all its American-Century trappings, it's set squarely in the age of American decline.
As a result, bloggers have created something of a controversy around the poster, suggesting that unnamed "people" are "upset" with it, when apparently the only people really upset with it are the bloggers looking to create controversy. Still, when a television network is accused of exploiting a sacred 9/11 image for its own purposes, it's worth looking once again at the image in question to see what those purposes might be. In particular, it's worth reminding ourselves that the guardians of American culture have been exploiting sacred 9/11 images since at least 9/12, and that Drew's photograph was initially deemed anything but sacred — was declared "exploitative" — because it told a truth that could not be easily exploited. At a time when the country was greedy for heroes and martyrs to give purpose to its pain, Drew's photograph portrayed a victim representative in his fear, his desperation, and in his solitary resolve. At a time when the country was desperate for images that were communal and redemptive, Drew gave it a man left to the mercy not of God but of gravity, and dying utterly alone.


The photograph was not called "The Falling Man" back then. It was called leering pornography, and sentenced to an invisible career as cultural contraband. It did not resurface until Esquire published a story entitled "The Falling Man" in its September 2003 issue, whereupon the photograph gained its title, and its symbolic status. You see, by that time it was clear that despite the best efforts of the American government and the American media, the legacy of 9/11 was not going to be moral clarity but rather moral unease — an almost vertiginous sensation of the ground giving way beneath our feet, along with just about everything else. That sensation, alas, has never gone away, and it is what has been mined brilliantly by the makers of Mad Men. If, in 2003, America was finally able to look at a two year-old photograph suggesting that it had to revise what it thought it knew about how people died on 9/11, by 2007 it was primed to watch a prime-time melodrama suggesting that it had to revise what it thought it knew about how people lived in 1960. It was ready to hear that what it had always regarded as American exceptionalism got its start as American entitlement, and was always fated to fall back to earth.
After I wrote "The Falling Man" in 2003, I got a call from a friend of mine, who said, "Well, now you have a book." I asked him what he meant, and he told me that anyone I wanted to write about could be written about for a book called "The Falling Man," because, in his words, "We're all falling men now." I never wrote the book, but I remember what my friend said every time I look at Richard Drew's photograph or, for that matter, the credit sequence for Mad Men. We're all falling men now. Drew's photograph became a symbol both specific and universal because it dared to tell us that 9/11 was not the beginning of something but rather the end, that it didn't constitute the "victory of the American spirit," as presidents and pundits tried so hard to tell us, but rather a loss, final and decisive, with which we'd always have to reckon. The "controversial" Mad Men poster has some of the same resonance, because it reminds us that the reckoning goes on — who could not imagine the figure of Barack Obama silhouetted against that limitless white background? — and started before most of us were even born.




http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/falling-mad-man-6648672





Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Jonathan Franzen / Interview / Donald Antrim

franzen_01.jpg

Jonathan Franzen. Photo by Greg Martin, courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

BOMB 77/Fall 2001 cover

Jonathan Franzen

by Donald Antrim

BOMB 77/Fall 2001LITERATURE



Jonathan Franzen and I conducted this interview at his dining room table, in his apartment on the Upper East Side, one morning in the early part of summer. Because we have known each other for a number of years, and have gotten better and better, over the years, at talking—at, I guess, knowing one another—we had some idea that we might be able to speak openly and comfortably about certain things that are not necessarily easy to speak about in a public forum, but are nonetheless central to Jonathan’s project. I was eager to hear Jonathan talk about various changes in his life, and about the ways in which his work has more and more become—at least as I read it—a kind of container for, and an expression of, lived experience. Reading Jonathan, I am always startled by how much I admire the writer, by how much pleasure I get in the reading. With The Corrections, I was up all night, until eight or nine in the morning. It seemed to me an absolutely thrilling work, brave and funny and beautiful and, above all, generous. There is something monumental about this novel. It is the product of a deep and prolonged struggle. Its intelligence is everywhere apparent. I could go on in search of words to praise this novel, words that might in some way be truly compatible with, might truly address, Jonathan’s achievement. Reading The Corrections, I feel myself to be in the presence of a work of art. The novel honors, and builds on, the tradition in which it exists.


Donald Antrim It’s been nearly ten years since the publication of your second novel, Strong Motion, and a few more years since The Twenty-Seventh City came out. I’d like to hear you talk about what went on during the years after Strong Motion — how your new novel came to be and what was happening in your personal life and in your family. I also want to hear some of your ideas about writing in general. Before we begin, I want to say that The Corrections seems, to me, profoundly and substantively a departure from your earlier books. In each of your novels, you devise intricate, sophisticated plots. You bring the reader along on a ride. Strong Motionand The Twenty-Seventh City both grow out of daring, somewhat implausible-seeming gambits: massive earthquakes in the suburbs outside Boston, the appointment of a corrupt Asian Indian woman as chief of the St. Louis police. As you think about them now, with The Correctionsnearing publication, would you say that your first two novels belong together?
Jonathan Franzen Yes, in that I continue to be interested in the dramatic intersection of personal, domestic stories with larger social stories. In the first two books, there were these large, externalized, heavily plotted dramas, at the focus of which were individual families. The new book goes about managing the drama very differently.
DA You were younger when you wrote those books—considerably younger when you wrote the first.
JF I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.
DA Well, if I understand what you’re saying, then—
JF I was a kid. And let me step back here and say that I was a very late kid—growing up, I had parents who were much older than I. To a substantial degree, my social life consisted of interactions with serious grown-ups. And in a funny way that’s what the first book, Twenty-Seventh City, was: a conversation with the literary figures of my parents’ generation. The great sixties and seventies Postmoderns. I wanted to feel like I belonged with them, much as I’d spent my childhood trying to be friends with my parents and their friends. A darker way of looking at it is that I was trying to impress them. The result, in any case, was that I adopted a lot of that generation of writers’ concerns—the great postwar freak-out, the Strangeloveian inconceivabilities, the sick society in need of radical critique. I was attracted to crazy scenarios.
DA Is this urge to become a younger peer of those writers who were prominent when you and I were growing up—
JF And we’re talking about Pynchon, DeLillo, Gaddis, Heller, Barth—
DA Certainly. But it sounds to me as if, with The Corrections, you wanted to make those conspiracy plots fall away, and that you wound up with a different kind of emotional landscape. For instance, Chip Lambert, the middle child in your fictional family, gets involved in a variety of dubious and self-destructive scenarios. There’s a love affair with his student, and, toward the end of the novel, a trip to post-Soviet Lithuania, which is fairly disastrous. Chip’s behavior seems like a result of his financial incompetency and his questionable sense of himself as a man in the world, more than a reaction to enormous forces beyond his control.
JF Actually the forces are substantially the same, but in the new book they take the form of interior urges and anxieties, rather than outward plot elements. We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally. Not that I take any particular credit for this shift of emphasis. Jane Smiley has this theory of an alternation of literary generations. Smiley thinks there are two fundamental possible preoccupations for the novelist. One is a kind of venturing forth to discover the wonders of the world, à la Robinson Crusoe or Don Quixote. That school of outward-looking fiction reaches its culmination in Candide, in which the world turns out to be full of horrors. Voltaire’s lesson is: Go home, cultivate your garden. And so the adventurous world-seeking novel is succeeded by the great 19th century domestic novel. Which itself then culminates in Kafka: you can stay home, but home is a horror, too. Within American literature you find the venturing-forthness in Twain and Hemingway, the at-homeness in Wharton and O’Connor. The dichotomy is gender-specified to some extent. But I feel like I’m essentially participating in one of those swings, a swing away from the boys-will-be-boys Huck Finn thing, which is how you can view Pynchon, as adventures for boys out in the world. At a certain point, you get tired of all that. You come home.
DA Speaking of boys, or men, in the world, you’ve written for Harper’s about the novelist as an increasingly marginalized figure in American society. Do you have feelings or anxieties that you’ve been aware of in recent years, not so much about writing a particular book, but about living as a writer of fiction?
JF I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers. He got up every weekday morning for forty-plus years, put on a nice suit and a hat, went to this wonderfully structured environment, and did work that he perceived to be important and constructive. I think any artistic child of a businessman is prone to a sense of the slightness of what he or she is doing. Of the uselessness of art. This uselessness is intrinsic, of course, and that’s part of art’s charm. But it’s useless nonetheless. And when you compound this with the general dimunition in the stature of the novelist since the days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who were celebrities to a degree that novelists of like caliber nowadays simply can’t be, when you compound this with the sense of being in one’s father’s shadow, well, you risk feeling like a little kid. My first response to this feeling of smallness was to try to Know Everything, to exude confidence and total command. But when the world refuses to be changed by what you’re writing—when the world takes, essentially, no note of it—it gets harder and harder to persuade yourself that your desire for total control, and your head-on engagement with Big Issues, is meaningful. So I’ve spent a lot of the last decade retooling. There were also changes in my private life that made it clear that the premises I’d begun with were no longer sufficient.
DA Let’s talk about your private life. I suspect that your experiences with family, and what I know about what you’ve gone through during this chunk of time, have a huge bearing on the ways in which family becomes, in this new novel, more central and preoccupying than in earlier work.
JF Well, my father died in 1995. Up until then I’d been trying, sporadically and unsuccessfully, to write a book that was similar to the first two, with an elaborate, externalized, and exceedingly complicated plot. Within a few months of his death, I began writing stuff that came from a very different place.
DA During those years, you actually worked over and discarded a huge amount of material. I have the impression of you tossing out about three or four possible manuscripts.
JF Yes and no. Even before Strong Motion was published, I had an idea for a third book. I tried to write it, I found it wasn’t working, and so I changed it. And I kept changing it, and changing it, and eventually nothing was left of the original, although it was still connected to the original in the way that my body now is connected with my body at the age of 12—all the cells replaced, but very gradually. Finally, about six years in, I said, “To hell with all that.” Material that was more urgent had announced itself.
DA Other things were happening in life as well. Several years ago, your mother passed away.
JF Yeah, my mother more recently. Frankly, though, the thing that enabled me to get those first two books written was that I had a very stable home life. I’d gotten married pretty much right out of college, to someone I’d gone to school with, also a writer, and we had a very quiet, very steady domestic life that we dedicated to reading and writing. That’s really all there was, except for tiny little doses of family and an honorary friend or two. Ours was essentially a universe of two, set up as a kind of antidote to the overwhelming family universes that each of us had come from. As long as that marriage lasted, I could just shut down questions on certain important personal topics. Is this relevant?
DA You’re doing fine. Keep talking.
JF Well, at a certain point our universe of two started breaking down. My first book was a big success. Her first book she couldn’t sell. By the time I was writing the second novel, there were tensions. And, in ways that are terrible to recall, those tensions just got worse. The early nineties were taken up with ever-more-desperate attempts to preserve a marriage, and then, finally, after that bargaining stage was over, accepting and mourning the death of this immensely important marriage. And meanwhile my father’s mind was dissolving with Alzheimer’s, and my mother was getting sick. Maybe it’s no surprise that the book I was trying to write in those years would change. What seemed to me important was changing weekly, daily, almost hourly. I think the last time my wife and I were together in public was at my father’s memorial service. Not long after that, something loosened up. There was a space in which I could actually start to write again, a little bit, something that was mine and not ours.
DA Let me ask you something. You’re talking about a growing discontent with work that had been supported by the conditions of your life, followed by a period during which your family, not only your marriage, but your own family—
JF All the people who were most important in my life—
DA Are no longer there. Given that you were having these experiences that you couldn’t control, to what extent were you conscious of exploring what was happening as it happened?
JF I’m uncomfortable with the idea that suffering creates material for art, or that conflict and trouble are what the novelist thrives on. I think it’s more accurate to say that the attempt to be a living, productive artist is often what creates the trouble and the conflict. I had an immense conflict of loyalties, for example, regarding my marriage. I felt explicitly that if I would just stop being a writer, I could make the marriage work. And it wasn’t just my marriage. My mother had my father on her hands. Ever more trouble out there. And I would go back home to the Midwest for four days, and then I wouldn’t go again for six, eight months. I had to preserve my emotional equilibrium in order to do my work. I felt terribly guilty about that, because in a sense, why not take three months and go and really help out? But I couldn’t, I would have gone crazy. We would’ve been irritating each other the whole time. But—and this is my point—the fact of who I am is what would have created the irritation. And who I am is a man who writes novels.
DA You’re describing something pretty difficult, the guilt over not being able to go home, and in the meantime exploiting, if not the more concrete and remembered experiences and events of family life, then something immediate in your relationships to your mother and to your father, just as you are losing them. So, I’m imagining that this could be a fairly frightening time.
JF Oh. Of course.
DA Do you also feel guilty for having written the book?
JF No. I don’t. Not at all. It’s akin to the flip side, as I keep trying to stress. There’s a flip side.That I was writing the book was what was creating much of my trouble.
DA Yes.
JF And the book in turn stands as a record of who I am. I wouldn’t wish it away any more than I would wish my personality away, or my privacy and individuality. It was a taboo-a-week in terms of its creation. I was constantly thinking, You can’t write about that. Each taboo was accompanied by a set of technical problems—how to make the material interesting enough to justify violating the taboo. But no, I don’t feel guilty. The most important experience of my life, really, to date, is the experience of growing up in the Midwest with the particular parents I had. I feel as if they couldn’t fully speak for themselves, and I feel as if their experience—by which I mean their values, their experience of being alive, of being born at the beginning of the century and dying towards the end of it, that whole American experience they had—I feel as if I’m part of that, and it’s part of me. One of my enterprises in the book is to memorialize that experience, to give it real life and form. Even if both of my parents would have personally hated the book, which they may very well have, I still don’t feel guilty about it.
DA Writing this novel was a kind of constant correction against some other novel you could have written but didn’t want or need to, and it’s a correction against something that might’ve been easier, in favor of something that feels dangerous.
JF Right.
DA Prohibited.
JF I did a nonfiction piece five years ago for The New Yorker about the tobacco industry and my own cigarette smoking. At the time, I was still concealing from my mother, whose father had died of lung cancer, that I was myself a cigarette smoker. I was talking one day with my editor at The New Yorker, Henry Finder, and he said: “How about the tobacco industry, do you have any interest in that?” I said: “That is the one thing I absolutely can’t write about.” And he said: “Therefore you must write about it.” And that became a kind of rallying cry for the book. The more I felt, Don’t write that, the more I knew I was on the right track.
DA Of course, writing the thing you can’t write is an opportunity for a certain amount of destabilization and confusion.
JF It’s bound up with shame. The resistance manifested itself as shame. “No, I can’t be that straightforward and, no, I can’t drop that mantel of utter mastery of fact and total control of data, because then I’ll appear as this weak, puny boy, and not as the sort of striding, dadlike man that I wanted to be.” Simply to write a book that wasn’t dressed up in a swashbuckling, Pynchon-sized megaplot was enormously difficult. I spent years trying to somehow make it nonetheless work before I realized this thing’s dead, and no matter how terrifying it is to let go of that kind of plotting, I have to let go.
DA Were the Lamberts in those earlier versions?
JF The Lamberts crept in little by little. I was developing the character of Chip, and, as a matter of process, I was trying to learn to write scenes in which I would conceive of a character and then make the character extremely uncomfortable. With Chip, I had the idea of a would-be East Village hipster—and then here come his grotesquely square Midwestern parents on precisely the day when his life is falling apart. Hence Enid and Alfred Lambert. Eventually I threw away almost everything that was not Lambert-related.
DA The Corrections, like the earlier two novels, is, however different, nonetheless a big, complex book. It carries us along, and to me at least it’s much more involving than the earlier books. I think this has something to do with the plot unfolding to reveal its own origins in choices made by the characters. The Lamberts’ lives are complicated again and again by their own actions, their lives are complicated by their own lives. In The Corrections, the conspiracies become personal. I’m thinking of Alfred’s Parkinsonism, his slow decline, as a kind of conspiracy of the body against itself. Alfred in dementia envisions a conspiracy of sentient turds. At the end of his life he imagines his nurses in a conspiracy against him. His paranoia is an illness of the mind created as a symptom of an illness of the body.
JF These are life-sized conspiracies. Gary, the older son, believes that his wife and children are conspiring to cast him as clinically depressed so as to win certain domestic battles, particularly the battle over whether his family is going to go back to the Midwest for Christmas. Gary becomes deeply paranoid himself, wondering not only whether he may indeed be mentally ill, but also whether his wife and kids are conspiring to make him feel mentally ill. There’s all the stuff that you might get in a typical conspiracy novel, except that here the conspiracy is a family matter. Likewise Gary’s contorted attempts to avoid turning into his father, and his paranoid suspicion that he’s failing. His attempts to improve on his father’s life make him all the more like his father.
DA Were you very aware, while writing The Corrections, of the Lambert children embodying or rejecting distinct aspects of their parents’ strong, domineering personalities?
JF To say that the book is thematically self-conscious is to put it mildly. I come from a kind of old-fashioned Midwest, and I live in a technocorporate, postironic, cool, late-late-late Eastern world. The two worlds hardly ever talk to each other, but they’re completely, constantly talking to one another inside me. And certainly my enterprise in the book, and probably the enterprise of most novelists at some level, is to take different strains in their own character, different modules in their own personality, and create whole characters on the page. I have my parents talking to me in my head and then other parts of myself talking back. I think this is potentially an interesting conversation. Something almost everyone does is vow not to be like his or her parents. At the same time, we mourn certain ways in which we’re not like them. Talking with one’s parents becomes a way of talking about the changes that have been wrought in the last 50 years by the various technological and political developments that we’ve seen in our lifetimes. Again, these are issues that the postmoderns were also writing about, but presented in a way that makes them more personal, relates them more to the family romance and the emotional life of the author.
DA Sometimes we create ourselves as our parents to the extent that we rebel against them.
JF Right, so there’s this drama of trying to correct, of trying to be different. This is what much of life is about.
DA Did you find in writing this novel that the converse could also be true, that the extent to which you accepted your parents in you gave you some freedom to be not them, someone of your own creation?
JF Yes. Here’s an example. There were about twenty years during which I basically couldn’t talk to my mom, and I concealed everything about myself from her. Sometimes I could hardly stand to be in the same room with her. This sense of mortification started at about age 12 and continued into my mid-thirties. Some of it had to do with her refusal to see what kind of person I was, and her specific disapproval of writing as a career. A different person, a different son, might have shrugged it off. And to some extent I did shrug it off. Or, actually, what I did was get married. I found a woman who liked what I liked. But then around the time my father got sick and my marriage was falling apart, something changed with my mom. She became more forgiving of all of her children, certainly of me. In the five years before she died, she underwent a transformation of her own. She discovered that she actually was happier being a less critical and more generous person. And as that happened, suddenly this window opened in me, and I realized, Well, you know, I’m actually a lot like her. I no longer had to deny that there was any connection between us, you know, I don’t know how I ended up with this mom.
DA This oscillation between acceptance and rejection is something the Lambert children struggle with all the time. They struggle heroically to avoid coming home. But of course they do come back again, near the end of the book, for Christmas. Christmas is an obsession with Enid, reenacting the rituals that seem obsolete and sad, like the Advent calendar on the door.
JF It occurs to me, as we speak, that Christmas is Enid’s novel. Christmas is the thing to be achieved. She wants it to have formal perfection. It’s something she works on, she’s obsessed with it, year round. Enid is an artist of Christmas, and she’s tired of her daughter-in-law’s inferior artwork. She’d like one last chance to produce a really good Christmas of her own. By which she means something old-fashioned—much as The Corrections itself is old-fashioned. And yet, because of the changes that have occurred in the family, and also because we live in a changed world, a fully old-fashioned kind of Christmas is no longer feasible. The holiday becomes, instead, a comic and tragic disaster. Well, probably more tragic than comic. I think of art in general, and certainly of a novel, which is an extremely conservative medium among the arts, as being about various familiar forms and rituals. There’s nothing really new to say about the human condition, and so every novel is kind of a ritual reenactment, or retelling, of familiar stories, which proceed along expected but somehow satisfying lines. This ritual aspect is one reason why, for me, in a larger way, art in general and literature in particular have basically replaced the Christianity of my parents’ generation.
DA Another way that the Lambert children all act out this business of escaping from home, or thinking that they’re escaping from home, is through sex.
JF An escape from Alfred’s puritanism.
DA Maybe I could just run through some of the sexual scenarios in the book. There are great, long passages of sex.
JF God, I was unaware of this, but go on.
DA Well, let’s see, there’s Chip’s academic career-ending affair with his student Melissa. There’s Denise’s affair with the man in her father’s office, another defining and destructive act. Later in life, Denise begins an obsessive, obliterative affair with the wife of the man backing her successful restaurant in Philadelphia. That’s not a great idea on the face of it. Denise is pretty much undone by sex, and so is Gary, who I think of as the orderly, sentimental son. He seems bewildered and frustrated over sex, and the lack of sex, and its replacement by angry domestic fighting in his marriage. There is also, at one point, Enid’s attempt to give Alfred a blow job. She’s trying to seduce him into using inside information to make financial investments that could change their lives. Alfred won’t tolerate the suggestion of a shady financial move any more than he’ll tolerate Enid’s blow job, and you could say that Alfred’s fear of a blow job causes Enid to feel, and possibly to be, poor.
JF (chuckling)
DA The evidence, to me, is of sex as a kind of report on the state of affairs between people who wind up alone.
JF Oh, that’s harsh.
DA Is that too harsh?
JF I think that’s harsh. I think the sex is there partly because I feel like it’s something I can write well about and I seldom see written about well, and so I naturally gravitate to it. But my breakthrough, the thing I learned in writing this book if I learned nothing else, was that a good way to write a scene, a good way to write a book, is to define a character by what he or shewants. Sex is useful to the storyteller because the wanting can be so extreme. The wanting is so blunt and ferocious. It’s a great plot device; once you take away conspiring Indians, or serendipitous earthquakes, you need something else to drive the plot.
DA Yes.
JF These are hungry people. There may be a lot of sex in the book, but there’s even more food. I feel as if I gravitated toward food and sex because I myself was hungry in a million ways—sexually hungry, literally hungry, hungry to have a new book done, hungry for attention as any novelist is. But I was also looking for a counterpoint to the relative abstraction of the cultural or political or linguistic preoccupations that drove the previous generation of big novels. Saying “I’m hungry and I want something” is a form of correction, a correction towards more traditional and humane motives for a novel.
DA There are many, many corrections in The Corrections.
JF Market corrections, and prisons. And Chip is obsessed with making corrections to his screenplay that he’s trying and failing to sell.
DA Enid’s attempt to correct her mood with what turns out to be a club drug that she gets from a bogus doctor on a cruise ship. And Alfred thinking about his young daughter Denise and about how he planned to give her some of the gentleness and indulgence that he withheld from Gary and Chip. But then you say, and I’m quoting, “What made correction possible also doomed it.”
JF Yes, a bunch of things going on there. For one thing, I’ve found that it’s possible to go for years or even decades without telling yourself the truth about your life. The most important corrections of the book are the sudden impingements of truth or reality on characters who are expending ever larger sums of energy on self-deception or denial; and what’s being denied, of course, is usually awful news. Death, for example. I also increasingly consciously saw the book as part of a conversation about American progress, the idea of self-invention. We live in an age of self-improvement, in a self-improving country with a long history of self-improvement; and I am reasonably obsessed with Gatsby. As for the particular line, “What made correction possible also doomed it,” in a sense that’s simply the tragic spirit. Every gain is offset by a loss, and most losses bring some sort of a gain. That’s the spirit of the book as a whole. Beyond that, I’d rather not interpret the line. I think it’s interpretable, but I don’t want to be the one to do it.
DA That’s fine, that’s fine.
JF But where does that leave us?
DA Well, that leaves me with another question. You mentioned that you have a self-conscious awareness of your own thematic material.
JF Oh God, yes.
DA Describe what you think the thematic concerns of this novel are, aside from what we’ve already talked about. More to the point, what do you think your large preoccupations look like, now that you’ve written three novels?
JF I’m not sure what my big preoccupations will turn out to be. We were talking earlier about the sense of being a threatened writer with a threatened sense of importance, and therefore a threatened sense of personhood. From my perspective, I feel like I’m part of an embattled, retreating cultural minority that cares about books and about the values that have traditionally been associated with literature—tragic and comic values. But these values are threatened by materialism, materialism in two senses. First the sense of preoccupation with things and with money. Potential readers are busy experiencing other entertainment and earning the money to buy the fancy technological equipment necessary to enjoy it, and so forth. And then, even more to the point, there’s a vulgar intellectual materialism that is encapsulated, for instance, in the currency of the term “clinical depression.” If I say, “At that time in my life I was clinically depressed,” in a way this ends the conversation. It replaces a potentially interesting story with a very simple, material story. “I was clinically depressed. The chemicals in my brain were bad. And I took this material thing into my body, and then the chemicals in my brain were better, and I was better.” Obviously I’m not trying to minimize the seriousness of actual profound depression. But what we gain as science learns how to correlate the organic with the psychological, we lose in terms of the larger conversation. The poetic, the subjective, and particularly the narrative account of what a person is and what a life means—I feel like the novelist’s vision is engaged in a turf war with the scientific, biological, medical account.
DA The conversation around something like clinical depression forecloses a larger conversation about grief or loss.
JF Exactly.
DA Or about changes in life that are frightening or even terrifying.
JF Or about harmful changes in society that we might want to resist.
DA I think the novel, and the business of being a novelist, and thinking not only about one’s own position as a novelist in the world, but also about the lives of characters who populate a novel—this is a way to keep the larger conversation from being foreclosed.
JF I hope so. I certainly see that in your own novels.
DA We’ll talk about that another time. I have one more thing to ask you. Is The Correctionsthe book you want it to be? Are you proud of it?
JF I wrote much of it very quickly. I wrote eighty percent of it in the last year. I was on a federal jury when I was finishing it. I came to the point when I had two days left to write the last section of the last chapter and then the epilogue. I wrote each of them in a day, and I finished each day crying and not sure why, whether because the content was reminding me of sad content in my own life or because I was letting go of something that had given my life structure and meaning for nearly a decade. There was, as I was getting the last pages down, just this sense of grief. It nonetheless felt very sweet. When I handed the book in, I had a feeling I’d never had before and fear I will never have again—the feeling that I’d actually done what I set out to do. I’d spent a couple of years thinking, My God, if I can pull this off, it’ll be good. But then I would get so terrified and excited by that prospect that I wouldn’t sleep and wouldn’t work until I fell back into my proper working mode, which is moderately depressed. Once I was moderately depressed again, I could continue to work. But at the very end, when I was done, I did have one moment of pure elation. Of Yeah! Okay!

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—Donald Antrim is the author of the novels The Verificationist,The Hundred Brothers, and Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.