Grand Union: Zadie Smith with Jennifer Egan

like many readers I learned of Zadie Smith first as a phenomenon the wunderkind who'd dazzled Britain with her first novel at age 24 before I'd ever actually read her fiction and as then 37 year old struggling in semi-obscurity to finish my second novel I will confess that I opened white teeth with a certain eagerness to find it wanting it took Smith all of 13 pages to convert me and I remember so precisely the moment when I crossed over into being her fan that I was able to locate it within seconds of pulling my old hardcover Edition from the bookshelf a few days ago nearly 20 years after reading it the first time the narrator is describing the job of one of the protagonists in the novel Archibald Jones at a printing firm quote designing the way all kinds of things should be folded envelopes Direct Mail brochures leaflets not much of an achievement maybe but you'll find things need folds they need to overlap otherwise life would be like a broadsheet flapping in the wind and down the street so you lose the important sections end quote so that's great obviously but what really got me is what follows after a couple more sentences there's a section break and the new section begins what else well Archie hadn't always folded paper that what else was my portal into the force field of Zadie Smith's work and intellect which I've been experiencing with amazement and delight ever since that what else signaled a narrator sorry signaled a narrator whose storytelling methods included open speculation about how to tell the story Smith's curiosity about storytelling as a practice what it is and how it works what it has been and can be courses through all of her remarkable work which includes not just five novels but two collections of prize-winning essays that gather up a kaleidoscopic array of lectures and criticism of books film music and art you can't get very far into a conversation about the state of english-language fiction without someone invoking and lately likely even quoting Zadie Smith that's how essential she has become as a public intellectual here's the opening of one of my favorite stories in her brand-new collection grand Union which were here to celebrate tonight the story is called Celso deconstructed quote the people are Kelso and Olivia a couple the setting a shabby rented room in the Bevington Road in Portobello it was Kelso's room until five weeks ago when Olivia moved in Kelso is from Antigua originally he's a carpenter olivia is a trainee nurse from Jamaica they are engaged to be married although they will never marry by the time the next sentence arrives it will be Saturday 16 May 1959 the last day of Kelso's life one thing about the last day of our lives is we almost never know that it is the last day from here stems dramatic irony and no more did Kelso know it end quote here is precisely the skill I fell in love with almost 20 years ago elevated now to a kind of literary Trinity telling a story calling attention to the way storytelling works and actually heightening the story's emotional power by exposing its mechanics virtually impossible to do but Sadie Smith does it again and again in these new stories grand Union and glitters with her curiosity about the variety of human experience and the variety of ways to render that experience with language into an instrument of empathy connection and truth as Smith herself wrote in an essay published just a few weeks ago quote belief in a novel is for me a byproduct of a certain kind of sentence I believe in a sentence of balance care rigor and integrity the sort of sentence that makes me feel against all empirical evidence to the contrary that what I am reading is fictionally speaking true end quote Smith is describing fictions deep alchemy the use of a sequence of words to transport the reader inside the consciousness of another human being and experience none of us will ever have in our real lives please welcome to the stage one of the finest alchemists of the English language Zadie Smith thank you I'd like to thank Jenny who is of course as you know an alchemist herself and I want to say quickly before I read I I wasn't able to see those students earlier I was students I was with my kids I'm sorry but like they say in school come and see me after I'll be at the I'll be at the table this story is called for the king arriving in Paris from Strasbourg I rushed from Gare de les to meet my friend V who had agreed to take me for a late dinner it would be his plan and his treat all I had to do was meet him on romantic one tell umber 915 outside my hotel I've been working and reaching my hotel with five minutes to spare took the opportunity to rush upstairs to change with that strange urgency sometimes brought to dressing for friends especially if like V they are themselves beautiful and well-dressed I took off the high-waisted jeans and severe severe shirt button to the neck replacing them with a long silk dress black but dotted with yellow flowers a crisp denim jacket big white trainers some very red lipstick I ran back downstairs I had informed my friend in an email that I was exhausted with talking that I had taught myself to death and he should do all the talking on all subjects no matter how small I wanted to hear everything even the dullest my Newton a of his life the moment we saw each other however we fell into a mutual unburdening speaking over each other in a series of overlapping waves as he walked through the city his work and mine his family and my own the situation in Europe versus the situation in America gossip about mutual acquaintances and any other interesting developments that had occurred since we'd last seen each other a year earlier in London I've been surprised to discover that he was in Paris at all and now he explained he'd won a bursary which had installed him as an artist in residence at the University so that he was presently surrounded on all sides by a cat he found them curious people never able to say a word without qualifying it from 15 different angles to listen to them he said is to be confronted with a massive verbal footnotes and by contrast whenever I open my mouth to speak unthinkingly as you know I always do saying whatever comes into my head everybody looks utterly horrified or else they tell me I'm brave but it's awful to be told you're brave when you had no idea that you were taking a risk the day had been unceasingly hot 28 degrees in October and by the time we got to the restaurant it was still warm enough to eat outside we were led to our seats by a waiter of incredible beauty who immediately became a topic of conversation he was black very young slender yet muscular and moved like a dancer between the tables openly flirting with many of the male diners including my friend and how is your boyfriend I asked V pointedly your boyfriend of 20 years standing who lives by the sea how is he oh he is well replied my friend with a look of mock formality upon his face he continues to be very well although we are in an interesting new phase of our relationship when I begin to notice that it's better if I tell him only about the amusing encounters where the sex went wrong or something ludicrous happened whereas if I have an actual connection with someone it's better if I keep that to myself because if I tell him he goes quiet he feels hurt in some way though of course for me it is exactly the real connections that are most worth talking about and therefore those are the ones I feel most guilty about keeping from him because by omitting them I emit a part of my real lived experience it's a conundrum listening to V made me smile when he asked me why I said I was thinking about all the middle-aged people in the world presently torturing themselves as they observed mainly via the lifestyle articles in their Sunday newspapers the polyamory of the young which led them to wonder whether after 20 years of marriage it was not too late to introduce the idea of opening up their own relationships in some way they laughed in my culture he said making the word culture sound satirical that conversation is radically sped up two men get together and are absolutely blissful the happiness goes on and on but then they checked the calendar and lo and behold three months have gone by and it's time to consider an open relationship the beautiful way to return to ask what we wanted to drink and a moment later in the most charming way possible expressed the usual French disbelief in the existence of a vodka martini he put picked up a bottle of white wine instead and sat back in his chair as the way to left admiring him as he returned to the kitchen I told thee that I used to think people were wildly jealous of what they perceived as a sexual freedom of men like him but now I felt that most people did not really want sexual freedom after all not at least if it meant having to grant the same freedom to those whom they wanted for themselves no what we wanted at least as much as sex was the opportunity to recreate replay and improve upon our old family dramas in a new house with new mothers and fathers except this time around your parent would be someone you could also have sex with as Freud pointed out one of Freud's greatest insights in fact was that there's nothing more perverse than bourgeois married life he nodded vigorously as he tore at a piece of bread amen to that these days I continued when I look at the figure of the aging lothario for example jumping from girl to girl what I really see is a man desperately looking to be mothered I wonder what happens to that instinct in men like you decide it's possible he said that the very definition of the gay man is he who has had enough mothering to last a lifetime over our main course we discussed prison sex clubs and orgies a good friend of these attended them with some regularity and had given him a full report which he now passed on to me I was very interested in the little lockers where you put your clothes and also the fact that so many people kept their socks on what interested me most however was the idea of treating other people like objects but before I could get very far down this line of inquiry my friend interrupted me I didn't say objects he said I was talking of body parts of orifices and members which is very different those organs all have the same capacity for pleasure and are equally ignorant of who owns them it's you who moralize bringing up the difference between objects and persons and anyway what matters at noir G is not a different attitude to people but a different relationship to time you v pointed a finger at my chest are altogether too conscious of time it distorts your view of many things even your own family drama I mean of course the age gap between your parents has always been understood by you as a fundamental inequality between them but I'm in a relationship with a similar gap and really think about it you choose to think it's so important because time is your preoccupation for example I can remember once telling you about a busy day of sexual encounters I'd had around the city and you said you couldn't really understand daytime sex on the grounds that it wasted time time that could be more profitably spent working he threw his hands up in despair it was my turn to laugh and also to protest in the spirit of these things I've been at least half joking yes persisted V but at the core of it there was a truth I think of sex any act of sex is something that ignores and in fact obliterates time so that sexual pleasure never is and never could be a waste of time because it negates time entirely after we had cleaned our plates in my case at the point you would never know it ever had food on it the way to returned and ignored or mutually feigned ambivalence towards dessert we ordered a platter of mixed cheese and a giant creme brulee I tried to defend myself by pointing out that a woman's life so often feels dictated by time biological time historical time personal time I thought of my friend Sarah who once wrote that a mother is a sort of timepiece for a child because the time of a child's life is measured against the time of the mother a mother is the backdrop against which a child's life is played out it might be understandable if such a time-weighted being hard to allow pleasure to entirely obliterate time he pretended to seriously consider this counter-argument but then as soon as I'd stopped speaking presented a substantial list of women artists past and present who delighted in daytime sex although how he knew this about them he didn't explain maybe you're simply too English suggestive V and I conceded the point by the time V paid the bill it was past midnight but as we started late we felt we hadn't quite had enough of each other so proceeded to café de Flore ordered more wine and considered all the exercise we would have to do the next morning to counter the effects of the wine cheese and sugar on our middle-aged physiques I asked him how he felt about aging he frowned and asked why was I worrying about the subject I looked exactly the same but that's what friends always say I replied and they're not lying but it's a delusion of familiarity I don't feel that you've aged or they're any of my friends of age but that can't possibly be the case yes if V but you really haven't or not that much so it's offensive and boring not to mention in bad taste to hear you complain about something that barely affects you I reached out to pinched V's waistband and pointed out the what 29 inches it had always been 28 he cried it's 28 please get it right and also make a note to remember I promise to do so with his iPhone V took a selfie of the two of us which we eagerly bent over the screen to study only to discover that neither of us looked anywhere near as young as we'd imagined but if we were white said V a little glumly putting his phone back in his pocket it would already be a lost cause so at least we have that to be thankful for still one day I know that I will look in the mirror and see one of those very very old men you see selling fish by the river in rural Chinese villages he said and you will look and find whatever that you make an equivalent of that is it will happen very abruptly will have been 37 for 20 years and then all of a sudden we'll both be a hundred and five by this point we were quite drunk our conversation staggered around haphazardly like an old fool stumbling down the road paying no attention to the cracks in the pavement we wondered about young people overhearing us we wondered what young people overhearing us might make of our ancient conceptual divisions straight gay by men women how ridiculous we must sound to them I put it to V that in revolutions young people are generally always right and old people almost always wrong but V rolled his eyes and said well if that were true we'd all still be living in spiritual cults in the San Fernando Valley I was wrong at 20 he murmured and I'm still wrong now being wrong is a life long occupation we felt quiet and watched the street traffic since my last visit to Paris a new kind of electric scooter had invaded the city like the Charles Version but twice the size are made of metal people left them abandoned wherever and whenever they felt like then took them up again using an app on their phones translating this new technology into ancient Parisian habits so that as we sat in café de Flore we could watch several pairs of picturesque lovers go by two bodies on a single scooter helmetless holding each other as they had previously done on Vespers and on bikes in to CBS and horse-drawn carriages or on the back of a farmer's trailer snug upon bales of hay it was very late we launched into a cruel assessment of previously pretty young men we'd once known and then back again to age in general to May in December romances and where the either of us still found people in the early 20s attractive he felt that absolutely yes he did although it was sometimes very hard to listen to their conversations well I had to admit that my apparently typically feminine occupation with time made the young more or less invisible to me now they were young enough to be my children I could see them in no other light something about this fact depress me with age and despite myself even my desires have become civilized and appropriate to cheer me v described an older French artist of his acquaintance he was 80 years old travelled all over the world to museums showing her work and always took with her a little case on wheels filled with lingerie she prided herself on regular one-night stands with men in the art world many of whom were in their 20s I told thee that was the French esteem I he agreed and we raised the glass to this octogenarian adventurous as we counted out our euros we discussed another old artist a man this time who had recently lost his gallery because of a series of exploitative sexual relationships with younger men what interested me and Vees account of the matter was that everyone had known that the man in question was a sentimental and submissive button who had a habit of becoming sloppily emotionally attached to his young lovers or victims depending on your point of view sending them flowers crying down the phone etc that the perpetrator happened in this case always to be the penetrated never the penetrator was an aspect of the case that played no part whatsoever in the newspaper accounts for whom the detail was of no interest either because it made no difference whatsoever to his guilt or innocence or perhaps because it was structurally invisible but so much of life is structurally invisible I noted and has no way of fitting into the external accounts of our lives our lives are so different on the inside we can never express their full particularity and strangeness in public their inner chaos and complexity there are always so many things it proves impossible to say yes it's the but at the same time you can't concede everything to the public account to what people see or think they understand in a completely different arena for example here in Paris I am Chinese the public part of me that is my face speaks for me before I can and so in the public accounting Chinese is what I am I cannot walk the streets with a sandwich board explaining my birth my nationhood my culture my history the history of my country and so on that would be exhausting impractical but neither do I concede to their external definition you have to be careful how much of yourself you render to Caesar of course I know what I am and given the time and space I can and will express the facts fully although in truth I don't bother very often it may be a question of sensibility I'm always very amused for example by the sort of person who gets infuriated if you mispronounce their name everywhere I go in France people ask me if it's a long way in my name or a short one they ask very anxiously as if they know many people for whom this kind of thing matters enormous ly and they don't want to make the same mistake with me I suppose continued V living peacefully in a society means understanding that the things others care about might mean nothing to you and vice-versa do you know what I mean in lieu of an answer I told him a story about a party I once attended which a man called me by another woman's name all night mistaking me for her maybe because she did the same sort of work as me I didn't correct him that we'd met many times before I tried to find it in myself to be insulted to feel as others feel to care as they would care but instead I felt strange lightness like had given myself the slip for the evening v listened in silence and then took his linen jacket which he'd not needed all night off the back of his chair I think that's why I keep changing cities he said to keep on giving myself the slip on the walk back to my hotel I wanted to tell one more story about something that happened on my train journey earlier that evening on route to Paris but there was no easy way to introduce it as it didn't in any obvious way connect with anything else we discussed seeming to come from another reality yeah I couldn't shake the sense that it was significant as we retraced our steps through the city gossiping and joking in the back of my mind I kept seeking some way unobtrusively to turn to my story without seeming like an egomaniac who did nothing but tell stories about herself but before I could find a solution we arrived at the door of my hotel we said our goodbyes hugging each other tightly and I ran up three flights of stairs drunk and happy grateful to have such a friend to whom one can say anything without fear but as I had this thought I remembered I hadn't told him everything I had not told him about the man with Tourette's on the train from Strasbourg he had been around my age though his hair was sparse and gray and he wore a light brown Mac of her trousers and shoes of the same shade as if in an attempt as if an attempt had been made to shroud him in camouflage poor Leroy the man said every 20 seconds or so for the king sometimes he repeated it much briefer intervals hardly pausing between repetitions of the phrase he could not help but say it the only choice before him was modulation he could be very loud or not so loud the woman next to him in her 60s who might presume to be his mother alternated between enjoining him to speak less loudly and answering each repetition gently without any sign of irritation oui oui oui mon amour boy Leroy for a moment my eyes met with hers she and her charge was sitting right behind me I had no doubt looking at her that she'd been listening to these three words for many years maybe decades perhaps mixed with other words at some earlier point but perhaps not the look she gave me I find hard to describe it expressed no pain shame or anxiety it made my application for forbearance pity or acceptance it was neither defiant not angry it was not even especially tired the face was completely neutral this is it her face said this is my life the carriage was full realizing that the man would not stop could not stop each passenger within a few minutes of settling in their seats reach for their earbuds and thus entered a private world I did the same what might have been a torturous trip 20 years ago was now no trouble to anyone there was a palpable sense of collective gratitude to technology this evening it would allow us to be our best selves it would not look over our shoulders sigh or privately pray for this beau knighted family to get off the train we would smile and take our seats with a sympathetic look signifying that we had no objection to sharing our space with the mentally afflicted where others surely listen to music or podcasts or movies or audio books i chose brown noise a warm static turned up high which allowed me to read a novel in peace entirely into uninterrupted the time passed quickly before I knew it I had arrived in Paris eager to meet my friend and taking off my earphones were surprised to re-enter reality I'd forgotten about one that had persisted while I visited another in this reality time could not be sidestepped avoided or obliterated it could only be endured so the man still had no choice but to say Polidori to repeat it every few moments sometimes screaming it sometimes not while the woman at his side who could so easily have stayed silent offered each and every time her quiet earnest response yes yes yes my love for the king treating the statement not as something involuntary essentially empty like the yolk of an animal but as a human utterance which still carried some form of meaning however small thank you thank you so much I love that story thank you and actually I wanted to ask you and this sort of leads directly to it you write beautifully about friendship and often about friendship both n:w and swing time one of my favorites of your books really delve into friendship over time it's sort of how those relationships evolve and in the story you just read you're reading about two people who have known each other a long time who are having a kind of the sort of conversation that you could only have with someone you've known a long time so talk a little bit about how why you're drawn to friendship as a fiction writer and sort of what it allows you to do why why it's a subject you return to um I mean when I was a young writer like I remember I mean it remains the case I don't seem to have any interest in romantic relationships or storylines I think things that are chosen freely chosen don't don't interest me that much that's the best way to put it and family interest me most because you don't choose it you're stuck in this series of relations and you have to mediate and deal with it and friendship is often a little like that at some point you made the choice but usually it's it's a little time in the past and there are these kind of fixed contingencies and also when it's good it's it's it's as close I think to a selfless relationship you don't you don't want anything in particular you don't want sex you don't want money usually hopefully when it's good it feels to me like an ideal form of human relation but I also think as I've got older you know when you're 18 you think you have 4,000 friends and then you made some of you may still be under that delusion these kids and the others but in in middle age certainly my regard for friendship is very high and I see how few I really have you know what a delicate thing it is and how much care it takes and how much narrative izing you know you have to tell a story about your friendship keep on telling it keep on animating it to make it feel worthwhile for both of you do you find that your friendships are most with writers or people that even go back further than that time in your life when you began publishing my oldest trick because I grew up in a very tight neighborhood most of the people I know I've known since oh there's two or three you know they're really old friends you go through all the same schools together and so there's that group of friends but then yes most of my other friends are writers I like writers it's a shameful thing to admit but I've always liked them so I know there are many writers who my idea of a literary community makes them feel physically sick like seeing writers every week talking to them drinking with them but I think of them as my people you know do you feel like there's a difference in the way that sort of community of writing works in Britain versus America what you you yes you choose to live here now mostly most mostly I choose I mean my children have you know made it inevitable by getting older but yeah I do basically choose to be here and and the main oh it's a slightly flippant but but it creates a big difference the biggest difference to me about New York compared to living in London is the absence of the kind of domestic necessity no one ever cooks me a meal in New York that's a good thing there are no dinner parties or very few and so to me like kind of literary connection with other writers it can be so much more fluid and quick and unencumbered you know it just involves going to a corner bar and getting drunk once a week it's very easy and it's in England to me it was always a very very class ridden thing it was about people's houses and what kind of dinner you cooked and whether you knew about what to legi I can't do any of these things I'm not I'm not a person who can do those things so this this suits me more the idea of a loose community that's there for each other but it's also aware that we've all got work to do you know and what drew you to be here in the first place and what made you stay I'm sure it wasn't our accents No I think it came from a long long way back up something to my daughter we're watching the first episode of Fame you know the old show and I saw that when I was about 10 and it kind of formed a complete fantasy life for me about New York I really thought I was going to arrive as people in leg warmers dancing down the street I was very that whole broad I wanted to sing and dance you know and so that it was always a kind of ideal place in my mind and then when I came here first I think I came with McSweeney's like on a tour with Dave Eggers and all that crowd when everybody was very young and it just it was just exciting to me I remember landing in New York and getting a phone call from Paul Beatty I think like in the cab it's like this is a very different scenario you know a writers are young and they talk to each other and you don't feel completely oppressed by the two or three generations above you it just felt full of possibility to me yeah and do you feel like I'm you you've drawn so heavily on this neighborhood creatively and on the neighborhood where you grew up in this kind of community you're so intertwined with does it feel how does it feel to be at a distance from that and also to write about it from a distance I don't I mean I'm I do think of myself as someone who's completely I don't know D resonated basically in authentic at this point I don't I don't have anywhere solid to be I try and make a virtue of that experience like I miss home terribly but home has moved on there's so many things I don't understand about England now and especially don't understand about street culture or the kind of communities I came from the distance is so huge and when I was writing this book I was thinking about my present neighborhood Greenwich Village which no offense to any Greenwich villagers but you know it is slightly an absurd place you know it's not it's not a it's it's kind of artificial it's almost like a movie say at this point but it became interesting to me exactly that kind of inauthenticity you know that the fact is people's life still does happen between the cracks you could still go to Washington Square and and feel something feel a real pulse of human life despite all the reasons you shouldn't and so I ended up wanting to write about that it is about I guess gentrification about life continuing through the gaps of gentrification about how densification happens all those things were in my mind and I was writing yeah do you feel like you're your distance from you know American and culture at least as you were growing up how yeah we're somewhat obsessed here obviously with our political situation yes yes how do you feel a distance from that and and is that a good thing or how does it affect you no I do I think I did used to feel a distance from it but not not anymore now it's foremost in my consciousness you know I was reading that book the politics of pain the Fintan O'Toole book about bricks it which is stunningly brilliant book but I realized I was reading it almost as a foreigner as news you know it's it's what happens here which obsesses me now yeah and much has been said about the sort of parallelism between the two situations as someone who knows both countries well do you do you feel that or do you feel that they're very different situations i I think they are different actually that what fintan does such a good job of explaining is that the English version is really based on a profoundly false narrative that's true in America too but I think in America there's more consciousness of the falsity of American narratives whereas in England the self-deception that goes very very deep and I I think what strikes me in England is you know when people talk about revisionist history in England to me it's not a matter of revising the history it's actually describing the history the actual history what was given to us was revisionist in the first place there's been no reckoning with British colonialism certainly no reckoning with British slavery and no real reckoning with Britain itself and the kind of full stories we tell ourselves which most entirely bound up with the Second World War which we wanted if you heard about that but we won that has distorted a political process for such a long time and I do feel I know things feel incredibly bleak here right now but I've always thought in America that the the counter voices and the counter narratives and the obsession with historical truth here on a part of a large proportion of community it's very striking it's always a battle because the pushback is so hard but but from a British perspective the fact that it's spoken aloud written about taken seriously it's important to me that's so interesting because I feel like one of the things were so worried about right now or I'm sure many people in this room and I know I am is this this kind of relativity of truth and the result you have a line in your story downtown from Grand Union which goes like everyone else in America these days I stand by my truth and you know there's there's obviously the the the phrase fake news has come to be something that is thrown at uncomfortable truths let's say so it's interesting to hear you kind of describing us as actually somehow more rigorous about being honest about the past then then it seems is often the case in Britain I'm just curious about that I mean I guess I was speaking from my history that concerned me when I was a kid which is basically history of the Diaspora and the amount of you can't even talk about it as lies more like silence it was really you could go through an entire British education without learning anything about Britain's relation to slavery apart from that they ended it that's the one fact you learn and that kind of aporia is so it's so dangerous but particularly to the formation of people so it would have been very helpful for people of my generation second generation Caribbeans to understand why their families were structured the way they were structured why economically we were in the position we were in what our relation was to this supposed by the country all of those things are not just you know flat during history books there self-making you know to understand these histories is to understand something about your positioning and I I do feel that a lot more of that history is uncovered in America it's always in the Battle of being re suppressed ignored spun as lies or but it but it exists and there is serious scholarship and so for British perspective it feels it always felt to me that diaspora history had was at least understood to be central to American history to put it that way that makes sense so I'm going to switch gears for a minute and talk about reading you wrote an essay a few years ago that made me laugh so hard in which you marveled at the fact that you were leaving to go to a dinner party and had placed in your book six or set I mean I'm sorry I had placed in your purse six or seven books and you were asking yourself what on earth do I think I'm gonna do with these I'm going to a dinner pretty well now we know how you feel about dinner break so it makes a little more sense but I wanted to tie on you you're obviously a voracious reader I'd love to hear about how you structure your reading how do you approach it and you know when where and what I mean I came in the cab here I've got like three bucks you know well yeah if I started if we ran out of steam here you can you could read a little i i i just torture for me i'm sure it's the same for you is how much balance to put on writing and reading I definitely read more than I write just because I enjoy it more and it's it's more nutritious to me and it it's what I like to do whereas writing is what I do but usually under some you know under the cosh a little pin and on and and it's painful writing is painful all of the time we're reading a great novel is for me it's just pure pleasure there's no downside to the activity and also I suppose I've always thought of it as um you know school I never stopped being a student like in my mentality so I read slightly selfishly for what I can from what for what I can get I read young writers to steal stuff do I read like non-english language books to be less parochial or to get out of this kind of moment I read some urgency I don't like to be bullied in my reading like now I top 10 lists and all that kind of stuff but certainly whenever I'm out with friends the first question I always have is what are you reading it seems to me like a superpower reading like it's just an extraordinary thing like recently a friend of mine fantastic Spanish writer Hawaiian Vasquez oh so I got really loud suddenly gave me this book it's like a 600 year old tiny short book this title I'm of course gonna forget it's like a prerunner to Don Quixote it's about a little servant boy being a slave almost in medieval Spain being dragged from pillar to post by awful people and as always reading eyes I just felt this feeling I used to have a child there like it's a miracle that I can be in this man's head it's a miracle it's like it's beyond time travel in the writers consciousness but in the milieu with the character to me that thrill of that is like never stops happening so I'm always hungry for it and I always kind of assume that the reading will result in writing that's the kind of writing I am right I am yeah and when you're reading do you do you mark things do you take notes how do you respond to two sentences that really touch you in some way I hope I will sometimes put a little exclamation mark that's about as far as it goes I don't because I'm marking student work a lot at the time you feel when you're reading your own stuff you want to feel liberated from having a pencil in hand I suppose my poor husband a lot of the time I just stop make him listen until he says I'm also reading a book stop doing that but there's a lot of that you want to share desperately a book that's good you know with others but but I am quite parasitic on them I know as I'm reading them that I'm building a reading list that's working towards a novel in some way in my mind like when I was writing swing time I was reading a lot of West African books a lot of stuff about the Diaspora I didn't know what it was building to but I knew that was my concern at that moment and something would come out of it but if I try and I don't know about you but if I try and make it like a conscious process and make structure it then the whole thing dies I have to kind of follow my nose and you you it sounds like you absolutely read while writing I know there and you've actually written about this and an essay that there are those writers who say it cannot cannot take in anything I'm purely expressing how do you how does your reading interact with your writing you know as you're doing it it keeps it you know it keeps your chin up I think it cheers me up occasionally if you have this you'll be in the middle of one particular type of novel you're there writing and a novel comes through the post because they send those novels we're so lucky a novel comes through the post by some radically different writer and I mean that can really that can really ruin my day why I just immediately assume what I'm doing is wrong I should be doing that but I'm already halfway through this and I have like a crisis of confidence you know I lose my mind a little bit so I'm curious to ask you more about that because there's a piece in Grand Union that certainly feels autobiographical although I have no idea that's how many things feel whether they are or not called blocked which is a kind of rumination about the writing process and one thing the narrator talks about is self-criticism and the difficulty of of functioning amidst it and one thing the narrator discusses actually I'm gonna even mark this so I'm gonna just read a teeny bit sometimes I'm asked how do you keep from getting depressed given the state of things given that it looks like this something you got started is on the brink of collapsing back into nothing the answer has changed over time I used to think parallel projects were the solution just keep on creating parallel projects and moving between them and then you never have time to really get down on any one of them so of course I couldn't help but think hmm is that really true about JD Smith so it leads me to ask you about process also oh I mean the funny thing about that story and I've come to realize because I keep on people keep on saying this to me it's in the voice of God so it's meant to be this kind of funny story about creating things but clearly like without realizing it it quite quickly became a Freudian account of making things generally but it was kind of a joke particularly for a friend of mine Daniel Kalman who likes he's a German right who likes philosophical proofs of God so the story is about all those different versions that God who has multiple worlds the God who you know the Kabbalah God who comes from reducing himself from the world except to accept all these different gods but I guess the question is the same right I was really thinking would it depress God to look at this situation how would how would she or he like deal with I was imagining I create a god who just creates and then hands-off lets you run and do your thing and of course as as literary theory is noticed throughout history that the metaphors of God creation and right equation are similar right a world that you make that you don't control that has some interaction with another life form who then deal with the exceptions that you so yet that there are there certainly are personal feelings about making things in there but I don't I have to I mean I don't feel like a God who makes things but I was interested in that in that idea you think of of the creator as without doubt and it seemed to me obvious that that if such a being existed that would be a daily a daily occur well in one of your essays you talked about and this was talking about your process about how the first 20 pages of a book are so critical and and everything sort of hangs in the balance is with each word and this actually speaks to the the little excerpt that I read with each word and sentence you know possibilities are opening and possibilities are also being closed off so so in a way it I mean God like is a little too heavy probably but there is a sense that this is a world that's actually being created in a very dynamic fashion and how and and then you just mentioned that sometimes while reading there can be this kind of loss of faith and whatever the project is and I know that feeling very very well myself and actually the students asked a question about that you know what do you do when you just feel like what you're doing is bad how how does self-criticism enter into your writing life I think I mean that like religious question why is there something rather than nothing it's also the writers question everyday why is there something rather than nothing and why this something and with a novel that something builds to the point of no return everyone's had the experience right you have this hope of many different novels or of a platonic novel or an ideal novel and very soon it becomes obvious that you're not writing that novel you writing the one that's in front of you I think managing that disappointment and within reasonable bounds is what makes a writer not imagination not creativity no the willpower and the ability to deal with that disappointment and and that gap between idealized thing and reality a kind of stealing us you know I was talking to I had a friend of student writer yesterday Sally Rooney a wonderful writer and she said exactly that it's it's she's very steely and you need a certain kind of steel enos almost more than any of the other things because Dow is is absolutely the your daily companion I just don't know how to write without assuming it's going badly and also because it because it's a matter of subjectivity the danger is a danger of real human life which is are you are you mad are you right are you saying and the thing you're writing communicates or I or are you mad not in the clinical sense but in a sense which the communication doesn't happen the God story is a good example if 9 meters out of 10 have no idea it's good my subjectivity is has blinded me to the distance between what I thought I was doing and what is experienced that to me is what happens on every page of every book and trying to keep the balance between self and other in a sane realm keeping yourself because you are you and not the other but communicating with the other being sure that you communicate there are novels and there are novels written when people do actually lose their minds or piece of philosophy where people have lost their mind with that circle closes and the communication stops and that's always my nightmare space but isn't it also true that the the culture and our own unconsciousness azar acting through us as we write so we really can't control in the end what what is communicated and I would say in my own case I think often the most interesting stuff is the stuff that I only discovers there later and sometimes because other people pointed out to me so that's frightening right that's a risk like I've when I'm teaching rights as I find a lot of younger writers are very resistant to exactly that risk they want to have total control over what they've written and total control of the person who's reading it and you can't do that it really is the money and the money if you're monitoring them tweet by tweet the reader is alone in that moment and you can't reach in and say actually I meant this actually I did this it wasn't there that's not how writing works it operates without you being present that's what's kind of magic about it and yeah and and of course if the writer also is quite alone in the process so I think about it a lot because my husband is in the theatre which is a very collaborative art form and even when things are going sort of badly or feel really hard there's this kind of camaraderie and communality that that buoys everyone's spirits so to what degree do you involve other people in your and how do other voices enter into it if at all I mean I I have I have a lot I need a lot of you know encouragement like a small child at all times every part of the process I think it's a strange contradiction and writers personalities that they believe that they are completely self-sufficient is that fair to say most novelists that I know like I was going to Australia recently and every novelist I told look to me with such jealousy not because of Australia just the flight the idea of being alone for 24 hours with 4,000 books no children is like the fantasy this is their fantasy and also things like prison I'm a lot of Rights of illusion if they went to prison it would be wonderful I've actually think that and it's so wrong it's not true because writers are in fact incredibly needy emotionally needy but they have this delusion that if you put them in a Cell everything would be perfect they do nothing but write wonderful books so I'm always aware of that that division I also think it would be so great if I was just completely alone but it's but it's not the case I need people I need personal relationships I need friends and I absolutely need editors unfashionable gatekeepers and anybody who is not me I need a second opinion all the time and can you talk just a little more granular way about the process itself and this is some of the students were interested in earlier sort of way yeah just the nitty-gritty of how you do it for me it's all about time because because of you know our lives with children and stuff so I I get up and we do the school run we drop the kids we try and do something physical otherwise what it's just like with being a brain in the jar anything a run or something and then me and my husband we often sit in the same study and get as much as possible done between nine and well 10 usually and to 30 could go to get the kids at 3 so it's a very short window and most practically speaking the thing I had to give up I suppose in order to do that was like a lot of internet time like I just can't if I do that then I lose two or three hours in what isn't many hours so I try and do email at night I try not to fall down Bayon say Google holes I try and focus on the work in front of me and get off line and just focus and then normally four hours of concentrated work would you agree is more than enough for any beyond that you get this like self-disgust boredom or if it's going very well mania you start writing nonsense so I think four hours is is good and and then the thing which is I think painful when your life is quite full with other things is the reading time or at least as I remember it when used to wake up at 10:00 and read in your bed for hours or do the New York Times quote like that's all gone so it becomes very you know I read a soccer practice picking up after singing lesson or whatever it is I'm always on all course on buses and trains always in any travel just trying to try and squeeze it in but when I'm writing itself I don't know a little bit at a time editing it always when something's finished my husband reads it friends read it in this case I had a weird thing where I I bumped into Dave Eggers I don't see very often but we were in Chicago together and he said you know we're getting middle-aged and it's hard to tell if you write well anymore I agreed yes I agree so why don't we swap books you read mine I'll read yours you tell me the truth who is going to tell me the truth so we did that and it was really it was really useful and that's a good example of like there were things there was versions of this book that he wanted that I kind of agreed with him but I didn't agree so you have a little battle so it was this book yeah but it was it was a really good exercise early like an old friend know someone you've known a long time it was good and how much didn't the feedback he gave you change the book that we now have he's Britney no he's a brilliant line editor so there's a lot of that stuff but I think the main I hope he doesn't might be saying the main thing was that there are two different books like I could have got rid of all all the how to put them like the older stories or the more traditional stories and just had a book which for the kids and Dave loves the kids and was like just do that but I was like but I like I like everybody so so I ended up with this kind of it's it's it reflects me I guess the idea that I always hope not always successfully for a reader who likes as many different types of things as I like that's just how it is and and I knew he was right but I just resisted it as on principle one another question that the students asked me earlier that that sort of speaks to this is so as how I had changed over time as a writer and you know you're still technically a young writer I think a writer is is younger until the age of 50 so enjoy it but at the same time because you've got started so early we've all been reading you for a very long time now how do you feel you've changed as a writer in terms of your goals your technique obviously there are children and and practicalities change but what about the actual the actual endeavor I think the most powerful thing in writing the thing I love to read is when you stop like applying for love that's the best way I can put it like I I do love first novels because there's they are so needy you know it's like look at me and here it's all that and that's great and white teeth was certainly like that but I something Ballard said it's really struck in my mind but you know Ballard had a very apparently boring looking life right three kids lived in the suburbs nothing fancy going on but the books he wrote are so radically free and wild and terrifying and imaginative ly insane and it was his I mean obviously he loved his family as well but one of its arguments I think was that when the life is seemingly staid the mind is free you're not asking for anything from strangers like do you like me am i okay do you love me am i am i interesting am i smart am i stopped it stops mattering whatever those emotional needs are supplied by actual humans that you know and so then the writing can can really get liberated or at least another way of putting it I think is it has a responsibility to be free because if your life is so quiet you have a responsibility to be a little a little wild in this in this hypothetical place so that that's the thing I noticed most is that I think when I was young I wanted writing to provide for me you know satisfactions like emotional satisfaction sucko revenge that's a big thing when you're young revenge on everyone who was mean to you in school or your family or revenge and did you actually do that I think I don't know her first novel that isn't about revenge I never I've never seen one it did it work no but it's not it doesn't mean to hurt anyone but it's it's kind of it's it's like a reply to some dissatisfaction you know some feeling of not being seen that's what that's it right you weren't seen and now you want to be seen in one way or another and and I do honestly love first novels for that they kind of so exciting the energy in them is so wild cuz it's often been bottled up for so long and then it explodes but I do also like the novels of maturity you know where where a whole life is seen in the round and that's kind of what I aspire to so now when I'm writing there's just a lot less you know bells and whistles I just want to write as clearly as I can yeah and you you've thought so much about and written so much about very thoughtfully about what fiction is and what it does do you feel that that what you are trying to do with fiction evolves over time or has it been fairly steady I think you should be flexible in your desires of fiction sometimes you have a particular task in your mind it's always these tasks are always of course self generated nobody's demanding that you do one thing or another but like in a book like on beauty for me that was really about I a certain kind of novel that I had grown up with and love they just didn't have people who looked like me in it so it was a very simple project you know I knew what I wanted to do and I wanted to provide that book so the next time some girl like me got into library like oh yeah there's that book that kind of big family generative 19th century style novel but I kind of know these people are recognized in this they're familiar so sometimes the the task is direct and there's a great satisfaction in completing a task but for me the task changes each time it just it depends on the project you know I don't have a single thing I don't think apart from perhaps always just wanting to make the argument hopefully not to didactically that all people no matter who they are feel themselves to be central in their own lives that that really is is the thing which concerned me at the beginning and the thing I still there's a thread of still now one thing I love about your work is that it in it is there's so much variety in it and you write about all kinds of people different ages different ethnicities different personal histories all of that and speaking of someone who never writes about myself at least not knowingly or people I know and actually I do it rather badly I love that that impulse in you and that and that confidence in that authority but one thing I find lately is that it feels like the trend is very much toward you know I guess what people would call call auto fiction it's certainly not new I mean in search of lost time is is auto fiction that's what Proust did and he did it beautifully but that coupled with a lot of hesitation about cultural appropriation about people's rights to tell each other to tell a story that's apart from his or her own life has created a sort of trend that I know I feel really apart from and not only that I feel that if this really is what fiction has to be then I actually can't write fiction yeah I mean so I'd love to hear you talk about I think a lot of it like that piece I just read that could be conceived of as author fiction right but it to say that really assumes too much as if author fiction is an entirely rhetorical entirely fictional entirely designed it's it's not more true than fiction it's a different form of fiction there's there's no more truth in that story than any other depending on how you define truth but just because somebody speaks in the first person I think you have to be a little less innocent as readers in front of the first person the first person is just a rhetorical device it's one of many that writers use it doesn't mean that when they say I there there on the page bleeding in front of you it's their true soul nothing could be further from the truth it's a rhetorical pose and I don't I don't think I know exactly what you mean but but I think it'd be better to remember that as you say it's a very old rhetorical pose and that have always been throughout the history of literature if you wanted to kind of broadly divide it to slightly different kinds of writers if you put compared someone like janae for example someone like Austin there are writers who have always been interested in limbing their interior always and they have always been social kind of hegelian novelists who face out what's happening now is that the internal limiters are having their day and but making an making ideology of it which i think is an error because it's in fact what it is is a sensibility that has run throughout fiction and one versus the other is not something that interests me as a competitive stance they're both interesting to me and you can find throughout literature beautiful examples of the depth of both but there are certainly writers for whom that the social project the idea of the kind of you know Elliott style span of people is just of no interest they are interested in living themselves a lot of the time it's in you know we think of it as a poet's habit you know if you compare like Langston Hughes to Zora Neale Hurston for example internal to external but to see in fiction I love to read those books I just I just revolt at the idea that that they represent some kind of like Fukuyama like end of fiction or it's all nonsense as an aesthetic ideology it's it's so dumb it's not even worth arguing about because it doesn't make any sense so I try not to engage with it at that level but the interest in other people I always take it as a cop ability I say absolutely this is a tick I this is a voyeuristic habit of my compulsive interest in people who aren't me I absolutely admit to that do you eavesdrop all the time yes with great fascination because you are absolutely trapped in your in your subjectivity physically biologically you are you are here in this body any opportunity of escape which is what the arts provide it's fascinating to me though also of course as always trying to write button si degrees of escape escapism which is immoral dishonest fantastical or just self calming creating imaginary others to bolster yourself that's always happened to stereotypes bad versions that that's always existed but the other kind is always existed to this kind of fascination animating force with another voice so I I think for me the argument is a little bit overstated in both cases honestly I think both can survive happily in a literary ecosystem of health and even in a memoir there are so many choices made and other people who have experienced you know similar you know who witnesses to those events might say that's not at all what happened I mean it's it's obviously all very subjective it's so subject I mean you go back to Thanksgiving dinner and try and make any account of your family history together it's dead in two minutes and your brothers or sisters and uncles and aunts aren't lying they just have literally lived in an entirely different reality from you as is true of all of us no matter how close we think we are as communities as racial groups as families your reality insight is inviolable it feels so different on the inside and fiction is just a little in no way definitive imaginative access to that fact you I'm curious about your relationship to technology you've somewhat famously expressed your lack of interest in social media and that sort of thing and obviously there's a time element that as I'm guessing part of that but it seems like it goes deeper than that what what is your and yet there is technology in Grand Union because of course people are involved in in all of these and social media and image making it's a big part of contemporary life I mean I'm with no way and described it as a lack of interest like I wouldn't say I have a lack of interest in heroin I just don't think it would be a good idea for me that's the way I would put it because it's addictive or here for me I don't know about the rest of you but for me that would be a fundamentally addictive thing I wouldn't be I wouldn't be able to do my work I just wouldn't be able to so it's an entirely practical concern but what about and I assure that feeling by the way and or actually I would say even as someone who kind of uses it I don't really feel the fascination that I think and it may be a generational thing that that some do but but what about its impact on inner life and it's it's kind of permit permeating of the culture that as a writer must be something that you do think about since you're you know you're capturing human experience at this moment in time how do you yeah I mean there is a good example argument that all these what must seem like grumpy Luddite novelists going on about social media in a way just jealous right because our job is behaviorism that's our job and suddenly were up against the largest collector of data and behavioral information the world has ever known and not only do they know everything they have total control of it they're able to manipulate you in ways I couldn't even dream off though I'd like to so it might it might be a vocational jealousy but to be more serious every night I don't want to go on an endless ramp but but it does seem really important to me not for our generation but for for young people to at least they might they might know all of this already but they might want to familiarize themselves with who and what they are interacting with because the illusion that you are interacting with each other only that that is an illusion and that's not you know conspiratorial thought or Luddism what's actually Luddism is believing that because you move your thumb like this forest you are a technological genius you are not you are not really that different from the kind of mice that moved around BF Skinner's behavioral experiments there's not much difference in what you're doing if you're programming cool let's talk about that but if you're just using that phone for what what is now I believe for a lot of teenagers up to six to eight nine hours a day I mean I you know it's what's not for people to sit on stage and preach to you this information is available to you you know what you're doing you know what it's doing to your democracy your ability to concentrate your children your free will I mean how many more things do they have to take from you before it's enough I'm not sure but it's up to the people to decide all right I'm gonna move to some questions from the audience this is a lovely one zadie we're in NYC do you like to go dancing how often do you go out dancing thank you III you know I live downtown so the opportunities a few went alas I sometimes I sometimes good I went dancing with a Jew Cola well ago that was funny by accident on Bleecker Street I wasn't planned but he was going somewhere and I bumped into him but I cannot tell you what that place was and then we sometimes go to a downstairs it's in the East Village it's like a club underneath a restaurant and I can't tell you what that's called either because I don't remember but it's it's it's lovely I love to dance in London it seems to be much easier less expensive more opportunity but the place I don't most often probably it's just in my in my apartment we when we get home from school put music on it's a massive dance-off III you know I liked even at this advanced age my back is going I like to see if I can do tik-tok dances my children bring back from school or I'm very invested in trying to out dance my small children alright well this this question follows pretty naturally from that Michael Jackson has appeared in your work more than once mmm in light of that I and perhaps all of us I'm curious to know what is your favorite Prince album and why I was so hard to chew oh my god I that's really I find that a very tough question um and I I mean I I went to see him over 20 times you know I saw him live so many times I think maybe it's it's I quite love the first one I love love sexy I love silent times I mean I was a teenager when these things came out and they were an obsession and actually even though it's not a popular one diamonds and pearls I guess I was 14 and I just listened to over and over and over again so has a soft place my heart how do your characters come to you do they stick around after you're finished writing I feel I feel a fondness for certain people particularly you seem to me to exist fictionally like kiki like some ad like Alex Lee people who are not really not based on anyone I know really but just when I think about them I think about them as if they were a person I know I think I think of them formally because to me there is success they worked as as people yeah and do they what realm do they occupy now that you're not writing about them anymore but you have written about them some I sometimes like if I'm at with my husband sometimes we'll see someone I hear someone speaking in it and I think oh that's a bit like Zorro or that that sounds like kikyo you know it's strange or fat - who's a girl in a small book or the embassy of Cambodia after I finished it like maybe the day after I finished I went walked up the street and I went to a pret ammaji and the girl behind the counter had a little sign that said fat - she was obviously west-african to my eye and there was like a out-of-body experiences my oh my god there she is so things like that I like it when that happens yeah so they're still they're still around yes yeah exactly certain of your stories reminded me of short fiction by David Foster Wallace did David Foster Wallace influenced your work at all certainly the shape of this book the thing I really admired about brief interviews with hideous men when I first read it is that every single story is an attempt to reinvent the wheel every single one it's it's such an extraordinary collection it's the work it's a work of madness in a way because who would want to sit down and try and find a new way to write a short story 23 times which i think is what he does in that book but I just thought it was miraculous I had never seen anyone worked so hard at the forum and be so determined to transform it you know it was a bar that was just setting credibly high and it's not about some of those stories are expressed very simply but they just each one had came from a completely unexpected place I'm they were fearless and I always remembered that yeah and you did you just did you think as you were reading that book that you've written about and for this for the asker of this question there's an essay and I think in changing my mind right about about David Foster Wallace and that book in particular the questioner might want to read it but did you as you were reading that work which came out long ago in Alan t99 yeah did you consciously think I want to respond to this in some way or does it just kind of seep in and it happens naturally I I it seeps in I mean they David like a lot of these writers of writers of when I of my youth you know and you kind of read them and deal with them and then you don't I don't really think about his work anymore and I don't think about the book of anymore it's just things you've passed through some things you return to like at the moment I like a lot of people I suppose rereading Toni Morrison you come back and you read it completely differently as an adult not as a 11 year old a 15 year old David I usually teach so I'm kind of back in that world very often but I think when I first read him it was just it was just the excitement like I come from a literary culture at least in Britain which is quite it moves slowly you know and it's very suspicious of any kind of formal experiment in England they think that's the business of the French and that you should just very very serious about what they think of as realism and any variation from it it's like unspeakable pretension and all the rest of it so it was just exciting to meet and to know that young people in America didn't think that French theory was nonsense or not they were taking it seriously and that was exciting to me and the last question is is really about about interior monologues and about third-person and I'm gonna sort of extrapolate from that and say how do you make craft choices and you must think about that you teach writing so you you I'm guessing you talk to students about choices of craft and how they serve the story or don't all the time how do you make those choices for yourself I'm gonna make a dancing analogy like when you are dancing particularly - I'd say black music in which song after song the beat completely changes and if you if you're on a dance floor full of people dancing to black music and dancing well you can see good dancers the moment the beat change everything has to change the movement changes the head nod changes everything to me it's like that like I don't have any set rules there are things it seems clear to me where I try and get across to some of my students at certain forms like for instance the first person present-tense can be very restrictive there's a lot of things you can't do it's like dancing with your hands tied together whereas the third person for me offers all kinds of possibilities much more freedom of movement but it depends sometimes like in that story the first person voice is just what I need in order to create that full intimacy to make someone feel that they're hearing the truth for that story that's what's necessary for another story I need to be distant and far away to make a different kind of point or to put characters together in a way in which I'm not I don't seem to be directly involved but but it that's quote for a swing time when the music changes so does a dance that that for me is the main aesthetic principle it I like to think of it as a principle of black culture but I can't have a proprietorial take on it but that's how I do do feel that there's a kind of adaptation in black culture change it up make it different cut it up do something different do it on the fly do it fast and that it that always interest me that spirit I think that's a good spot place stop thank you so much thank you

Channel: 92nd Street Y

Views: 19,855

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Keywords: 92Y, 92nd Street Y, Zadie smith, grand union, Jennifer egan, readings

Id: FtPrrSaavVA

Length: 79min 25sec (4765 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 20 2019