Friday, Feb 11, 2022 • 55min
A Spiritual, Dangerous Quest in the Himalayas
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Harley Rustad talks about "Lost in the Valley of Death," and Jessamine Chan discusses "The School for Good Mothers."
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Pamela Paul
Harley Rustad
Jessamine Chan
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Break
Pamela Paul
00:36
What happened to Justin Shetler, a thirtysomething adventurer who disappeared in the mountains of
India
? Harley Rustad will be here to talk about "Lost in the Valley of Death, a story of obsession and danger in the Himalayas".
And what would happen if the state could penalize mothers for not being good enough parents.Share
00:60
Jessamine Chan will join us to talk about her best-selling novel,
"The School For Good Mothers"
. Alexandra Alter will be here to talk about what's going on in the publishing world, plus my colleagues and I will talk about what we're reading.Share
01:18
This is
The Book Review
Podcast for the New York Times. It's February 11 I'm Pamela Paul
.Share
01:26
Harley Rustad joins us now from
Toronto
, he is the author of Big Lonely Doug the story of one of Canada's last great trees and his latest book is called "Lost in the Valley of Death, a story of obsession and danger in the Himalayas"
. Harley, thanks so much for being here.Share
Harley Rustad
01:45
Thanks so much for having me.
Share
Pamela Paul
01:46
Let's start with the key figure in your book, who was Justin Alexander Shetler?
Share
Harley Rustad
01:53
So Justin was a 35-year-old American traveler who arrived in
India
in the summer of 2016 and unlike a lot of travelers who visit that country, he wasn't immediately drawn to places like the Taj Mahal
or you know the beaches of Goa
, but to the mountains to the Himalayas
and this one tiny corner specifically called the Parvati Valley
which is named after the Hindu goddess of love and devotion.Share
02:24
And three years before Justin had quit his job, gave away his belongings and set out on this really indefinite journey by motorcycle, initially around the
US
and then internationally all the while building up this sizable at that time, sizable following on social media, on Instagram and YouTube and this journey that ultimately led him to India,
and he arrived with really a deep intention, a very specific goal of going to the mountains and living in a cave.Share
02:57
These sites that have been throughout history, places of great transformation and revelation to test himself, to push himself and in the valley, he found not only his perfect cave that he lived in for a month, but this pilgrimage, this guide a Hindu holy man a Saadhu to lead him on this journey to the glacial source of the
Parvati river
. This place called Mantali Lake which is where Justin ultimately vanished.Share
Pamela Paul
03:27
I'm going to wind, way back on that path to the tech startup, 2013, what was he doing there, and why did he leave? What made him become as you described him a traveler and a traveler of a very particular type?
Share
Harley Rustad
03:42
He was the kind of person that was sort of constantly reinventing himself and a bit like a chameleon would put on a new skin to see what kind of expressions could be found in that occupation or in that place.
Share
03:56
And so he grew up when he was a teenager, he grew up in his wilderness circles, these academies of survivalism and wilderness awareness and natural study, and he threw himself into that and worked his way up very successfully within those circles and then moved to
San Francisco
and started a punk band that's quite successful punk band called Punch Face in San Francisco
ultimately did that for a few years.Share
04:24
And then he once again was presented with this opportunity to be the traveling face of this tech company based out of
Miami
, which is, he was originally from Florida
and move there and for three years lived this life of glitz, and you know, high-flying, staying in fancy hotels and eating in Michelin starred restaurants and making quite a lot of money.Share
04:46
And ultimately realized that none of that was deeply fulfilling him and had this moment of what truly fulfills me is, is independence and freedom and a life on the road and exploration.
Share
04:60
And so he had this in some ways quite classic break from the path that had been set before him and gave up everything and hit the road.
Share
Pamela Paul
05:09
But it sounds like there was a little bit of this in his childhood experience and what were these wilderness programs who were his parents?
Share
Harley Rustad
05:16
His parents separated when, when he was 11, and he was largely erased by his mom through his teenage years, but very quickly got into these wilderness schools. And so it was boarding at the school just outside of
Seattle
in Washington State
and in some ways found that elusive father figure, that elusive mentor within these schools in these legendary figures within these circles.Share
05:41
And that had a deep impact on him, not only kind of crystallizing his worldview, but also shaping his spiritual attitude as somebody who was brought up in a very religiously fluid household influences from his father who had these big experiences in
India
incorporated Hinduism
and Buddhism
into his life and his mother who was this follower of ECKANKAR
this slightly obscure religion.Share
06:06
In part, Justin's search was to try to make sense of all of these questions that had long been in his mind. Is there a higher power? And what is my connection to that?
Share
Pamela Paul
06:16
To what extent would you say that the spiritual component motivated his journeys?
Share
Harley Rustad
06:22
I think a large part, I think there was since he was a young kid and a teenager, there was this longing to understand his place in the universe. And if there was a higher power out there, be it God or Shiva or mother nature or what have you. And to be able to really feel that, I think he was a skeptical person.
Share
06:45
I think he was a very curious person, and I think he represents a lot of things that are quite universal right now. This, these people who identify not as religious but as spiritual in this kind of great spectrum of what makes sense for me and I will take different parts from different religious teachings and different parts from around the world to create this spiritual conglomerate of what do I believe in.
Share
07:10
And I think Justin in part his travels were a means to that end to find these teachers to find these expressions to put together something that really resonated within him, a worldview, his own spirituality and his own perspective on him and his relation to something bigger.
Share
Pamela Paul
07:30
So there's that and then there's this curious mix with the tech startup side of himself and with his social media presence which is still up there. We'll talk about that more later, and you look at his Instagram for example, he's this, you just have to say it like very good-looking, muscular guy who seems to be aware of his physical presence, and he's in a lot of these photos, it's not just the scenery.
Share
07:54
Talk a little bit about how he approached social media and the relationship between that and the spiritual journey.
Share
Harley Rustad
08:01
He was a very good-looking guy and I think if you go to his Instagram account which is still active and still live, I think he's somebody that could potentially be quite easy to roll your eyes at and right off.
Share
08:14
You know, there are a fair amount of shirtless selfies on his instagram account, but I think it's quite easy for people to write him off as somebody who was just out there for fame and recognition to have an enormous following and to kind of reap the personal and potentially financial benefits of what that could bring you.
Share
08:34
But I don't think that's entirely a truthful read of who Justin was, and I think that is a very common thing, we all present ourselves as a larger than life figure or really at least curate what we want to present ourselves to the world.
Share
08:50
And that's not necessarily truthful, that's not necessarily accurate to who we are. And it's almost like Justin because he was entering this world in 2013 really Instagram influencers were just starting to monetize their content. It was just starting to really explode, and it was almost as if he was, he had put himself onto this train, and it was starting to run away with him, and he had no idea whether or not this was going to end up as a force for good or a force for evil.
Share
09:20
And I think there was something that he was deeply trying to search for and that his social media accounts while they gave him a platform to potentially inspire people, something that he really, really longed for and struggled with was solitude.
Share
09:38
And right now it is, it's almost impossible to, to achieve that true solitude in this world of deep, profound connectivity and so as much as he validated and found value in that platform, it also, it was impossible. It created this barrier for him to achieve something pure isolation and what can be found in those moments of solitude.
Share
Pamela Paul
10:04
I didn't mean to sound overly dismissive of his Instagram "Adventures of Justin" because one thing that struck me at least looking, especially at those last posted, it's haunting to see his presence there and those last post, can you just describe a bit about what those final posts say and ultimately told you and your research figuring out what happened in his last days.
Share
Harley Rustad
10:29
So he essentially, wherever he traveled, he posted photographs and stories to instagram, he created these, you know, really quite beautiful wordless videos he uploaded to Youtube and you know, he was interviewed by blogs and all sorts of stuff as his name grew and as a journalist, as a reporter who's trying to piece together this puzzle of somebody's life.
Share
10:51
His social media was a, a very rich resource. It had timestamps and you know, locations and people that I could interview who are tagged in his posts and it was this enormous, enormous resource for somebody who was following his trail.
Share
11:06
But it also presented a problem, as I said about where the truth lies and what is posted was that picture posted at that exact time and is this story that it is representing and presenting truthful and accurate and so there were some challenges there and I had these moments where he told a story online that I then had to pick apart and I found flaws and inconsistencies in that story and I found that deeply, deeply fascinating and added this whole other layer to his story.
Share
Pamela Paul
11:36
When and how did you first encounter Shetler and his story?
Share
Harley Rustad
11:40
Really I encountered the place before the person I first went to
India
in 2008 as kind of this classic post-university graduate, having no idea what I want to do with my life, you know, head to India,
and hopefully I will find some answers and direction.Share
11:57
And I had heard about at that time during that trip, I've heard about this place called the poverty valley and I never went during that trip. But it was presented as this place of unparalleled beauty of kind of classic Himalayan life. It's intimacy with the mountains but also this place with this really dark, tragic history, a place where since the early 1990s dozens of international backpackers have mysteriously vanished almost one every year.
Share
12:26
And so in the fall of 2016 because I had spent a couple of years in
India
had kept in touch with Indian media and came across the latest person to disappear in the valley.Share
12:38
And when I found his social media, I realized that this was a story not just about one person who have disappeared, the latest person in this tragic, dark history, but about somebody who had a fascinating back story, had a very complicated backstory and whose story raised a lot of very current issues. And so very quickly it drew me in very intensely.
Share
Pamela Paul
13:01
What are some of the issues that it raised for you, his story?
Share
Harley Rustad
13:05
One of the ones that we've talked about is how we present ourselves online today and the differences between how we want to live an authentic, truthful life that is honest to ourselves and to our history and to our identity, but how we present ourselves online and where those discrepancies are, where those flaws are. And I was just fascinated by that, and Justin spoke to that so perfectly.
Share
13:31
I think it also was this in some ways a classic story of an adventurer gone missing, and you know, lots of parallels can be made to,
Into the Wild
, Christopher McCandless
, and you know, people like Everette Ruis who disappeared, another young man to disappear that time in the American southwest in the '30s.Share
13:52
And in some ways it was that classic story, but to me, what really drew me in was that this was sort of an updated 21st century version of that story that talked about the challenges of presenting yourself on social media. This kind of deep longing to better understand ourselves spiritually, and also this new generational angst that I think Ruis spoke to, McCandless spoke to, and I think Shetler speaks to that as well.
Share
14:22
This very 21st century issues that we all kind of struggle with in terms of connectivity, finding isolation, the challenges of social media, the pressures of social media, enormous pressures on social media that I think deeply affected Justin.
Share
Pamela Paul
14:38
So there are two threads here that I think are of perpetual interest. One is that internal interests that some people have to go off to have this journey of self discovery, to travel to leave home to have this great adventure. And then the second related one is our desire to read about those stories, especially when the adventures go wrong. And I'm curious to what extent those two threads played into this narrative.
Share
Harley Rustad
15:08
In some ways it's the universality of those stories that there are forces that there are issues that these people represent and that I think we all can kind of relate to and I think that touches something really human and makes people really draws them into these types of stories.
Share
15:30
And what I think also deeply affects us is that they are sometimes the more extreme versions of something that we've all thought about, there's a long, long history of people who have dreamed of going to live in an Ashram in
India
or meet their guru and a lot of people who have done just that in literature, tons and tons of stories, this deep history of that.Share
15:54
What Justin's story represents, and he may have taken that desire that colonel and taking it to its furthest extreme, to an extreme that I think a lot of people wouldn't necessarily take it.
Share
16:06
But I think what that taps into for most people is an expression of something that we all hold quite dear, which is this, this searching this desire, this curiosity to better understand the world and our place in it and that is something that everybody feels regardless of where you're from.
Share
16:27
We all want to know where we fit into this great maelstrom, this great kind of chaos of the world, where do we fit into this? What is our place? What is our role? What legacy are we going to leave behind? Whether that's family or a career or what have you?
Share
16:45
And I think it's those types of things that the average person can pick up and latch onto and really identify with, even though these people may take it to the wilds of
Alaska
or you know, the deep Himalayas
in India
.Share
Pamela Paul
17:00
I think we all want to know what happened to Justin Alexander Shetler, but I'm not going to ask you to reveal that on this podcast, people can read the book.
Share
17:09
But just one quick question about that legacy. When you look back now at his Instagram at his social media presence, having researched the book and written the book, what strikes you about it now that maybe you didn't see the first time?
Share
Harley Rustad
17:27
I first reported on this story for Outside magazine, and that article was largely an investigation into what happened in
India
and the search to find answers. His family flew to India
and his friends flew to India
and there's this enormous search in the U. S.
To try to find clues, and I detail that in the book. When I started working on a much bigger version of that story, a much deeper one. I think what surprised me were some of those relatable aspects to it.Share
17:59
For me looking at, you know, a budding social media star, I don't see a lot of myself necessarily in that. And I grew up really in a non-religious household, and so I didn't necessarily think that I was going to connect so deeply with some of those torments really, some of those issues that Justin was grappling with, quite as deeply as I did working in this book.
Share
18:22
And in part that had to do with the research I did the reading I did, but also to really put myself in Justin's shoes and in certain experiences and in certain perspectives that he had and that really opened my eyes to some of these conflicts and some of these issues that he was working through, that I never really felt like I would come across, or I was always perhaps hesitant to and that really did surprise me.
Share
Pamela Paul
18:51
All of that comes through in the narrative. I will leave it to listeners to discover the rest of the story themselves. Harley, thank you so much again for being here.
Share
Harley Rustad
19:00
Thank you so much for having me.
Share
Pamela Paul
19:02
Harley Rustad, new book is called "Lost in the Valley of Death, a story of obsession and danger in the
Himalayas"
.Share
Break
Pamela Paul
21:15
Jessamine Chan joins us now from Chicago. Her debut novel and already a bestseller is called
The School For Good Mothers
, Jessamine. Thanks so much for being here.Share
Jessamine Chan
21:24
Thank you so much for having me on the show.
Share
Pamela Paul
21:27
So this book has such a delicious, I can't believe nobody has done this yet premise. Give us the setup of your novel.
Share
Jessamine Chan
21:35
Well, my novel is about Frida Liu, a Chinese American single mom who loses custody of her toddler daughter, Harriet, after having one very bad day. And in order to get Harriet back, she has to spend a year at a government run institution for moms from all over the county whose transgressions range from benign to horrific.
Share
21:55
So if the mothers don't pass the school's tests, they'll lose their parental rights and the readers will follow her journey through the school and her struggle to hold on to her integrity while being indoctrinated. I like to describe the book as a little bit like 1984, but for moms.
Share
Pamela Paul
22:14
So this is the most obvious question, but I have to ask it, where did the idea come from? Because it felt like you took all these threads of things we've seen recently, there's a lot of conversation around foster parenthood and why kids get taken away.
Share
22:28
And it reminded me of Kim Brook's "Small Animals", which is a memoir that came out a few years ago. And I think you've mentioned that a story by Rachel Aviv in the
New Yorker
was one of your direct inspiration. So, can you talk a little bit about that story? What struck you about it and other influences?Share
Jessamine Chan
22:46
Well, Frida's very bad day, definitely grew out of a very good writing day that I had in early 2014. So I'm definitely not someone who sits down with a plan to say today I'm starting a novel. But what happened was that I was entering my late thirties, and I was very, very stressed out about the decision to have a baby or not.
Share
23:05
And feeling that the time pressure of choosing one of those paths. And a few months before my very good writing day, I'd read the Rachel Aviv article called Where is Your Mother?, which appeared in the
New Yorker
in late 2013. And that story is about a single mom who leaves her toddler son at home and after that and the neighbors called the police when they hear him crying and after that day she never gets him back.Share
23:29
And I think something about that story just lodged in my mind. I didn't have it next to me when I started drafting, and I didn't necessarily think about in a dealing basis, but I think it just left a kernel of rage inside me. And I felt like what happened to that mom was so unfair, and I really wanted her to have another chance to raise her son.
Share
23:51
And it really made me think a lot about the question of the government or any anyone representing the government, setting a set of universal standards for parenting or trying to measure things like tenderness or love by some set of data. So those were the threads that that led to the book.
Share
Pamela Paul
24:09
You mentioned that your protagonist Frida Liu is Chinese American and to mention the government's dictating family, I can't help but think that there may be a link between communist
China's
oversight of parents and until recent one child policy and its involvement and the way it dictated family life. Was that something that informed this idea as well?Share
Jessamine Chan
24:32
I think somewhere in my family history and in my mind like it was informing it, it was not directly informing in the sense that I don't think I was super conscious of it. But the
Cultural Revolution
definitely affected my family's life and my father and his siblings and his mother escaped China
to move to Hong Kong
right before the Cultural Revolution,
and he was affected by world events like the great leap forward.Share
24:57
So that was definitely part of my family's life that has never really been talked about too much. But it's something that I read about a lot when I was younger, and always had a kind of terrified fascination with the idea of mind control and reeducation.
Share
25:12
So you mentioned that you felt this rage when you were reading that Rachel Aviv story. What was the source of rage for you?
Share
25:22
I felt such rage that it felt like the mom in that story could never do anything right because the standards kept changing, and it felt like they were really judging her by a very western, very American set of parenting standards. So for example, I think they were critiquing her on her tone like when she spoke to her child or how much she hugged and kissed him and that sort of judgment can't help be biased.
Share
25:48
And so something about that just really stuck with me, and I think I ended up becoming kind of obsessed with the subject and going down the rabbit hole of reading the other books and articles that she cited and starting to read more about how the government encroaches on family life.
Share
Pamela Paul
26:07
What does it mean to be a bad mother in the invented world of this novel and a good mother?
Share
Jessamine Chan
26:14
Well, the standards in the book are purposefully set up to be impossible, to sort of draw attention to the way that our culture and society and government sets up such punishing standards for moms. So if the moms do succeed, it's really by chance, it's not really clear that there is a way through the system.
Share
26:35
So there's the tests are meant to be impossible or taking a little bit of truth from real life. Like the idea to pay close attention to your child. But in the world of the book, they can never ever look away and their, their level of eye contact is measured for example.
Share
26:50
So really the net for what constitutes a bad mother could really be anything. It could be the obvious, which is leaving your child at home, hitting your child like classic cases of child abuse and neglect to things like complaining about them on Twitter, so I folded in a much broader range of offenses.
Share
Pamela Paul
27:12
You mentioned that in addition to governmental interference, control demands of parents and mothers in particular, also the social and cultural demands. And I'm wondering in what ways are those dual forces the same and different and in both in real life and in the novel?
Share
Jessamine Chan
27:32
Well, I'm gonna try to answer this question, but it might be a little bit circular. I think one thing that that struck me as I was contemplating becoming a mother and thinking about American parenting culture was the expectation that moms have to be happy all the time and that there's sort of no room for them to have thornier feelings.
Share
27:54
I think what's exciting is that the book is coming out at a time when there is a lot of conversation about motherhood, the sad thing about the time in which it is being published is that the world has never been more punishing for parents and for moms than it is right now.
Share
28:08
But I think that 10 years ago, for example, the books that are coming out about motherhood like "Night Bitch" for example, there wouldn't have been as much room for them as there are now.
Share
Pamela Paul
28:18
You began this book before you had kids, and we're still writing it right when you became a mother.
Share
Jessamine Chan
28:24
Yes, I had to rewrite the whole thing, pretty much.
Share
Pamela Paul
28:27
I was going to say how did that change? How did that change the book?
Share
Jessamine Chan
28:31
I think it's probably not the average journey to parenthood to feel freaked out about having a baby and then started a dystopian novel about motherhood. But that is where my mind went, and I'm sure my daughter will have things to say about that when she's old enough. But I started the book in 2014 and then my daughter was born in early 2017, and it took me about 10 months to get back to writing.
Share
28:54
But when I started writing again, I found that I had to pretty much re conceive a lot of the lessons. I had to change a lot of very basic things that I got wrong, like in the earlier drafts Frieda and Harriet had these incredibly long conversations because I had an 18-month-old speaking in paragraphs, I didn't understand the level of language acquisition, I didn't necessarily understand a toddler size.
Share
29:18
So I had the mom's bathing the babies and sinks. For example, I had the mom's running through actual fire because I didn't know that I could have the dolls do something simple, like trying to not drop food on the floor. It would be much harder than running through fire.
Share
Pamela Paul
29:34
I mean, these are all sort of practical considerations? Was there anything deeper or more emotional that you felt like, you know what, I, I didn't get that quite right before.
Share
Jessamine Chan
29:44
Oh, definitely when I say I had to rewrite everything, I mean, completely, completely rewriting it. So I think what really changed was, I think Frida's relationship with Harriet became much richer, and it became much more possible for me to render a mother's love for a child on the page.
Share
30:01
I definitely came to motherhood just very nervous about the whole thing. Everyone told me how much I was going to love my child, but that's a very abstract notion until I was actually holding my daughter in my arms and I thought, "oh, okay, I get it. I get the thing that everyone is trying to tell me about".
Share
30:19
But I think I was also able to make Frida more loving, more vulnerable, She became much warmer. And also she became a much more competent parent because I think I had imagined myself failing on every level once I had a baby, just because as anyone who's read my book can tell, I'm a fairly anxious person.
Share
30:39
So I think I didn't understand that I would enjoy some of the rituals, like bathing her, combing her hair or like helping her get dressed in the morning? So, so I think some of the simpler joys also made it into the book.
Share
Pamela Paul
30:53
How do you think your own anxiety comes through in this work of fiction? Like do you think that readers can detect your anxiety as an author through this book.
Share
31:01
It's a pretty high anxiety read. I think from what I've been told. I've been describing into people as not the most relaxing read, but hopefully worthwhile because I've definitely been hearing from a lot of people about just how much they cried at the end and I just thank them for feeling all the feelings with my characters.
Share
Jessamine Chan
31:21
But I wove my experience of depression anxiety into the book because one thing that really changed during the writing of the book was I was encouraged by my internist to completely go off antidepressants before trying to get pregnant, which led to this whole mental health crisis during the writing of the book.
Share
31:40
And so that was one of those things that was completely terrible in real life, but great for the project in the sense that my real life suffering was, became more material for the actual narrative.
Share
Pamela Paul
31:54
Tell us a little bit more about your main character Frida.
Share
Jessamine Chan
31:59
Well I'm gonna have to quote my agent Meredith Kaffel Simonoff because she always puts these things best, and she put it best by saying that Frida is a character driven by love.
Share
32:09
So Frida is in her late thirties, she's newly divorced, she's in a city where she's very isolated from friends and family, she doesn't have a support network, she's working at a job that she doesn't particularly like, and she's definitely just struggling to get by not sleeping under a lot of stress, but I also think of her as the Chinese American heroin that I always wanted to read.
Share
32:33
She's really flawed and desirous and selfish and vulnerable, but I think she has her heart in the right place every step of the way, even if she makes a lot of mistakes.
Share
Pamela Paul
32:44
See there are so many things driving this narrative and different things will strike different readers. But for you as a writer, what most interested you in the story? Was it the plausibility of the idea? Was it, how will freedom respond? How will this end? What kind of kept you going as a writer?
Share
Jessamine Chan
33:03
The thing that kept me going over the years was writing a story that came from a really personal inquiry. I felt very oppressed, I think, by American parenting culture and the expectations on moms, and I felt very conflicted about entering this culture and having a child.
Share
33:20
And so the questions and the feelings driving the book definitely came from me. And so there were things that I just wanted to say and ask about our world and how we treat moms. So that really kept me going. It wasn't necessarily that I was trying to write the most realistic story.
Share
33:38
But I guess I wanted to draw attention to some of the things that I read about that really troubled me. The fact that the government does take Children from parents, thousands of them all around us. And it only rarely makes the front page news. And so I wanted to draw attention to that issue while also talking about American society.
Share
Pamela Paul
33:59
I was going to say there are some very realistic components to this book, and I don't want to give anything else away about the plot. So I think we will leave it there for readers to discover. Also has this really beautiful kind of Giorgio de Chirico type cover
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Jessamine Chan
34:14
It's the cover of my dreams.
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Pamela Paul
34:16
Oh, is it?
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Jessamine Chan
34:17
Yes, it's definitely, the, I mean, I'm completely obsessed with it.
Share
Pamela Paul
34:21
Well how so? actually, just tell us a teeny bit about that, and then we'll end there.
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Jessamine Chan
34:25
Well, I love the pink, which is an important thread in the book, but I also love the idea that readers are entering a portal to another world because there is a jump in the book from a strictly realistic world to a slightly different world. So, I like the idea that the readers are gonna go through the doorway with me.
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Pamela Paul
34:45
Alright, we will leave potential readers there Jessamine, thanks so much for being here.
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Jessamine Chan
34:49
Thank you so much.
Share
Pamela Paul
34:51
Jessamine Chan's new novel, her debut is called
The School For Good Mothers.
Share
35:06
Alexandra Alter, joins us now with some news from the publishing world. Hey Alexandra.
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Alexandra Alter
35:10
Hey Pamela. So we've talked for, let's see two years now about the pandemic and the impact that it's had on the publishing industry which has not always been even or negative, there's been some real upside, seeing people buying more books and book sales surging across all formats.
Share
35:28
But one thing that I've been watching and waiting for is more literary fiction that addresses or confronts what has occurred since
Coronavirus
hit. And given the gestation period of a novel, we're just starting to see the first trickling of literary fiction from really prominent writers that tackles the pandemic in interesting ways.Share
35:49
Some of the books that I am looking forward to or have read in early copies include
Anne Tyler's
"French Braid" that's coming out this March from Can Off, and it's very much a Tyler
classic. It looks at generations of a single Baltimore family, but it concludes in the contemporary era, when families have been separated and struggled to come together.Share
36:12
So that was kind of interesting to see how she, in her own style, with the same preoccupation she always has with waving the pandemic into this novel. Other ones that are coming out this year includes
Roddy Doyle’s
short story collection, "Life Without Children", which looks at the impact of the pandemic on everyday life.Share
36:33
And he has by doing a short story collection. It's interesting, he can zoom in and out on different kinds of characters with different kinds of jobs. The effect on a husband and wife, for example, who maybe had been looking past each other for years, but get to know each other during quarantine, a delivery person who suddenly finds themselves on the front lines, a nurse.
Share
36:54
And he talked to me about how he felt like he was working on this novel, that suddenly when the pandemic hit just didn't feel realistic anymore. So he had to switch gears.
Share
37:04
And a number of the writers that I've spoken to who have decided to write about the pandemic said similar things like this, became such a life transforming event for almost everyone on the planet, that it couldn't be ignored in fiction. Of course, that presents other interesting narrative problems. You can't always control the timing of a book.
Share
37:22
I think there's some concern about are people going to want to read about the pandemic next year or later this year? Are people done with it? Do they want to read more escapist fiction? How much do you make your book about the pandemic? Or do you just try to capture the atmosphere?
Share
37:36
Some writers I spoke to said "they wrote the novel that they would have written in any case, but they're kind of adding little details" like a character is putting on a mask to go into a store or something like that, to signal to the reader that this is a pandemic time novel, but it's not necessarily a pandemic novel.
Share
37:52
So there's this fine line that writers are trying to walk and this has already become, just like the pandemic itself, a kind of polarizing subject. There was an interesting Op-Ed in the
Los Angeles Times
that the writer Tom Bissell
published, where he basically admonished people not to write pandemic novels.Share
38:08
He pointed out, and I did a little research and, you know, he was correct about this, that the 1918 flu pandemic produced very little in the way of literary fiction. Writers were not directly responding to the pandemic in their work. I think people wanted to move on, it was so traumatic. It was right after the war, and there was just so much exhaustion from mass global trauma.
Share
38:28
So, you did see the 1918 flu come up in works later, but these were often decades later. And if it was evoked, it was very subtle, people would talk about ringing the church bells for the dead or something like that, but they wouldn't directly write about it.
Share
38:42
So,
Tom Bissell
argued, there's a reason there's not a lot of literature because a mass disease is not a great organizing principle for a novel. It's not a very good adversary, it's random, it's invisible, it affects everyone. He was saying, don't do it, stay away from it.Share
38:60
And of course, then you have other writers chiming in on Twitter, where else? Like
Gary Shteyngart
who wrote a pandemic novel "Our Country Friends" that came out last fall, got great reviews. He said, "counterpoint, right? Whatever the bleep you want", I can't see it on our podcast, but you can fill in the blank.Share
39:16
So, it started an interesting debate, I think, about how do you take this really insane world event and weave it into a story. Is it a distraction? Is it part of the atmosphere? Can you leave it out, or is that weird? So it's something that a lot of writers are thinking about even in their next books that they're planning for 2023.
Share
Pamela Paul
39:37
Well I'm going to mention a book that I've mentioned at least four times on this podcast over the years, but it is so good, which is
William Maxwell's
"They Came Like Swallows" which was about the 1918 pandemic, specifically about his mother's death, and it was an autobiographical novel. So one of the few good thing's fiction wise to come out of that tragedy.Share
39:58
But the other thing, and I'm curious how you feel about this, Alexandra is looking at TV as another form that's trying to grapple with, like to what extent to, you have things take place during the pandemic or not? Like, what is it like for you watching TV shows where there's no pandemic. I sometimes have this kind of knee-jerk reaction of like where are your masks, how are you all sitting around just talking?
Share
Alexandra Alter
40:21
I do have that reaction too, and I'm wanting to lean into anxiety, so I inhaled all of the
Station Eleven
, I binged it. This is an adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel's
pandemic novel which actually came out in 2014, but the show on HBO
came out this year. And so they actually had to make it during the pandemic. And I think it really changed the experience for the show runners and all the actors.Share
40:44
So yeah, I like to embrace the anxiety and sort of, the other thing that's great about her novel in the show is that their pandemic is much worse than ours. So, in some ways that it can make you feel better.
Share
40:56
I did read a really interesting piece from our TV critic
James Poniewozik
, looking at how shows are either putting the pandemic in the past by ignoring it, or he used the example of the Sex and the City
reboot on HBO
. There's sort of flick it up by saying, "remember we all had to stand six ft apart", so, sort of giving the viewer clues that we're not in the pandemic anymore.Share
41:18
We're in some indefinite future in the near future, which is, you know, I'll take the optimism whether it's good narrative or for TV I'm not as sure, but it'll be quite interesting to see the work that comes out of this pandemic. It took fiction writers a few years sometimes to metabolites
9/11
, but you saw some really interesting fiction about that tragedy. And I think similarly, writers say it's our job to process these huge world events and what they mean for everyday life.Share
41:51
And so some people are going to do that by just telling an individual story and not necessarily addressing what the pandemic meant on a big societal or political or global health level, but looking at what it meant to live through it and what it felt like. So I'm looking forward to a lot of these books.
Share
42:08
Another one I forgot to mention that was announced recently, but it won't come out until the fall is
Ian McEwan's
novel, cannot be publishing that in September, and it's titled "Lessons", and it's this entire life story of this man who's roughly McEwan's ages in his '70s, he lives in London
. And so in the final sections of the novel, the pandemic has occurred, and he's reflecting back on his life.Share
Pamela Paul
42:30
Well, maybe it will prove more enjoyable to read about the pandemic than to live in a pandemic.
Share
Alexandra Alter
42:35
Hopefully, I'm betting it will be.
Share
Pamela Paul
42:38
All right, Alexandra, thanks so much.
Share
Alexandra Alter
42:41
Thanks for having me.
Share
Pamela Paul
42:49
My colleagues, Gregory Cowles and John Williams join us now to talk about what we're reading. Hey guys.
Share
John Williams
42:54
Hey Pamela
Share
Gregory Cowles
42:54
Hey Pamela.
Share
John Williams
42:55
Hey Greg.
Share
Pamela Paul
42:56
Greg, let's start with you.
Share
Gregory Cowles
42:57
Well, I'm still reading "2666" by
Roberto Bolaño
, but it's going slow, and I'm not at the femicide section yet. So as I have said previously on the podcast, I'm not going to talk about that one just yet, what I've also picked up in the meantime, partly because of Janet Maslin's review of it and partly just because this is an author, I've never read that.Share
43:17
I know Pamela you like and our colleagues Tina Jordan and Liz Egan really like her a lot also is
Jennifer Haigh
who has several novels behind her now and her new one is called "Mercy Street".Share
43:30
It is set in
Boston
on Mercy Street, a small street off of the common that Anne Sexton
wrote a poem called Mercy Street about that street, about trying to find a house that she remembered there. And in this Jennifer Haigh
novel, Mercy Street is where a women's clinic is an abortion clinic where the main character, Claudia works as a phone counselor and an intake counselor bringing clients in.Share
44:00
So it's a book very much about abortion and about women's rights, and I was a little bit hesitant to pick it up because of that there's always a danger with this kind of hot button, topical political subjects that the author will feel the need to preen and soapbox.
Share
44:18
But Janet's review and Janet herself in talking to her about this book convinced me that that's not what
Jennifer Haigh
is all about, and in fact she's not at all. We really get a lot about Claudia's background.Share
44:30
She grew up poor in
Maine
in a trailer and Jennifer Haigh
specifies it's a single wide trailer, not a double wide trailer, which makes all the difference in the world. It's essentially like a shipping container. With a mother who was very badly equipped to be a mother and took on lots of foster children just because the state gave her money to raise them. And it was the only way that she knew of to make a living, but really not much of a caretaker, not much of a mother at all.Share
44:56
And so Claudia has had to make a life for herself. And after a brief stint working at a women's magazine in her twenties, she quit, she moves to
Boston
, she starts volunteering at this clinic and then is hired and as the book opens, she's been there for like nine years. The book opens on Ash Wednesday and there's a fairly large group of protesters outside the clinic, which apparently is the case every Ash Wednesday, it starts the lent protest season at abortion clinics.Share
45:25
So you have this immediate sense of conflict and tension and that there's going to be a run in, and then
Jennifer Haigh
subverts that expectation. It pulls you along expecting the conflict and there's lots of conflict in the book, but it's not what you expect, it's not the violent sniper or bomb attack or anything like that.Share
45:48
And in fact as much as we go into Claudia's life, we also go into the backgrounds and lives of many of the protesters, one in particular, a guy named Victor who has over the years become more and more radicalized listening to Right Wing Radio, and he's very much a loner. He is in fact a former army sniper.
Share
46:08
And the book is set in 2015, and you really get the feeling that she's as interested in Victor and his radicalization as she is in standing on a soapbox for freedom of choice.
Share
46:20
And she's looking at this whole question of how somebody becomes radicalized. And so it's it feels not accidental that it's set in 2015 before the 2016 election when political polarization was so much in the forefront of everybody's attention. So that's what I've been reading John, how about you?
Share
John Williams
46:40
I am about halfway through a novel by the British writer
Sarah Perry
. It's her first book, it's called "After Me Comes The Flood" which I love the title. Was published in 2014 in the U. K.
It was published a really strong reviews over there is the debut.Share
46:55
I think it even won
The Guardian's
First Novel prize and I think was only published in the US
a couple of years ago after she became a bit more well known here for her ensuing novels, one of which is called The Essex Serpent
and one of which is called "Melmoth", Melmoth.Share
47:11
So I picked this up because I someone online had recommended it somewhere, and it's unlike things that I usually read. It's quite gripping, it's a mystery, almost it's like a metaphysical mystery.
Share
47:22
There's this guy named John Cole who owns a bookstore in
London
. And he closes his shop one day, and he goes to visit his brother on the coast during a heatwave and a drought and on his way there, his car breaks down, and he walks through these woods, and he comes upon this very large ramshackle, but once stately mansion in her home.Share
47:43
And as he gets to the door, someone opens it and greets him very enthusiastically as if they've been waiting for him, and they even say his name, and he's quite confused, and he walks in and as he gets the lay of the land, he realizes that this group of people who live there, there's a matronly type, there's an older guy, there are a few young people, and it's unclear what their relationship to each other is, but that they all have been expecting someone with his name to come and stay in a room there.
Share
48:13
And he doesn't really take the opportunity ever to disabuse them of this idea that he's the wrong guy, and he's wondering what's happening. He's trying to figure out, you know where he is and what this is.
Share
48:24
He's at the point I'm at, he's becoming closer to this young guy named Alex who and this is where the title of the book comes from. As far as I can tell, believes that a nearby reservoir is going to burst, the dam is going to burst and that the water is going to flood the house away.
Share
48:40
And it's a little bit Gothic, as you can probably tell. It's very subtle, there are portents and there are feelings of dread, but it's not done in capital letters and in some ways it's just kind of quiet story about these people who live in this house and who they are and him getting to know them.
Share
48:58
And I'm glad I'm only halfway through because it means that I literally can't spoil it and I wouldn't want to be tempted to because I don't know if it will end with some clear description of what is actually happening and whether this is a dream or real or who they think he is.
Share
49:13
But either way, it's that central thing that keeps you reading, and I found it very engaging, and I have wanted to read her other novels, and I'm sure I'll get to them someday, but I'm starting with this one, Pamela. What about you, what are you reading these days?
Share
Pamela Paul
49:26
Well, I finally finished
Our Mutual Friend
by Charles Dickens
and I feel like I could devote four podcast conversations to the novel, but I'm going to try to keep it to one.Share
49:36
So this is
Dickens
last complete novel. So late Dickens,
and it is 800 pages really gets going, I would say it around page 375 but then, you know, it's really, it moves along, and you know, like so many Dickens
novels very multi character, lots of digressions.Share
49:56
This one is about the way in which money corrupts and it starts off with a really atmospheric, seen for those of us who like things like the rivers and people who collect stuff along the rivers, which is like, I think a whole subculture, this starts off with a scene of the people whose job it is to collect dead bodies out of the thames.
Share
50:19
And it begins with a body that's discovered and there is a case of mistaken identity that forms really the biggest plot device of the book is someone who is not who he seems, as it so often is not only in the works of
Dickens
but everywhere else. And there are lots of eccentric characters.Share
50:41
I think my favorite characters in the book. Well, no, I won't say my favorite, but one couple that I really like are the Lammle's Arthur and Sophronia Lammle who have been married by and here's a Dickensian named the Veneering. The Veneering's this very rich, obviously, superficial couple has introduced the Lammle to one another, and they are each under the impression that they are marrying into money, whereas neither of them have any money, and it's on their honeymoon where they realized that not only did neither of them very rich, but together they're broke.
Share
51:13
And so they've been tricked into this headwind into it by the Veneering and so decided to basically spend the rest of their marriage united in scheming and revenge and just trying to get by, financially, and I'm just going to read a teeny little paragraph describing them at the end of the night of scheming.
Share
51:31
"And thus the Langley's got home at last and the lady sat down moody and weary looking at her dark lord, engaged in indeed violence with a bottle of soda water as though he were wringing the neck of some unlucky creature and pouring its blood down his throat as he wiped his dripping whiskers in an ogreish way. He met her eyes and, pausing, said with no very gentle voice. Well, I'll end there".
Share
51:58
So there's a lot of really great descriptions. There's another character Podsnap, Mr. Podsnap and the chapter that introduces him is called "Podsnapary", I'm going to read to you from the introduction of the character Mr. Podsnap.
Share
52:14
Mr. Podsnap was well-to-do and stood very high in Mr. Podsnap's opinion, beginning with a good inheritance, he had married a good inheritance, and he had thrived in exceedingly in the marine insurance way and was quite satisfied. He never could make out why everybody was not quite satisfied. And he felt conscious that he set a brilliant social example in being particularly well satisfied with moose things and, above all other things, with himself.
Share
52:41
Thus, happily acquainted with his own merit and importance. Mr. Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him, he put out of existence. There was a dignified conclusiveness not to add a grand convenience in this way of getting rid of disagreeables, which had done much towards establishing Mr. Podsnap in his lofty place and Mr. Podsnap satisfaction.
Share
53:02
I1 don't want to know about it. I don't choose to discuss it, I don't admit it". Mr. Podsnap had even acquired a peculiar flourish of his right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems by sweeping them behind him and consequently shear away with those words and a flushed face, but they affronted him.
Share
53:20
I just thought, you know what I would say.
Share
John Williams
53:21
That's great.
Share
Pamela Paul
53:22
Not only are there so many Podssnaps out there, but you know there's something, there's something a little bit alluring about, you know, living the life of a Podsnap.
Share
53:32
Yeah, I mean I wish I was. That's right.
Share
John Williams
53:34
I have to admit that I am vastly under read and
Dickens
. I read Great Expectations
in high school, but I haven't read anything else.Share
Pamela Paul
53:40
You know, I think I have a new Christmas tradition of reading either
Dickens
or something Victorian around Christmastime, I used to go up to this house that we would rent in Vermont
over the Christmas holidays mostly to ski, but also to read by the fire and that ceased during the pandemic, we could no longer rent that house, but it was there that I started the habit I think with Bleak House
, which I read by the fire. And now I realize you know what, I'm just going to make a dire at home, damn it. And pick up my Dickens
novel here. So that's what I did.Share
John Williams
54:11
Each of the past three years or so, I've started each year with a particular friend promising that we read
Bleak House
together, that it hasn't happened yet, but hopefully soon.Share
Pamela Paul
54:21
Oh, it's worth it, it's worth it. And a few other things I just want to mention really quickly about this book. One is in this book, he
Dickens
, I think, tries to make amends for the perceived and probably actual antisemitism of Oliver Twist
, which of course, he later went back and rewrote Fagan a little bit to address some of those anti-Semitic stereotypes, but here he creates an entire character and some might say he overcorrected and that the Jewish character in this book is a paragon of goodness.Share
54:49
And then another character, this was sort of intriguing but ended in disappointment. There's a character in the book named Jenny Wren who is born with some kind of very serious physical disablement, she can't really walk and she, her father is a drunk, just, it's a really, very actually modern description of alcoholism and her father.
Share
55:09
And so from a very young age, she's assumed the role of parent of her own father and very blatantly treats him as a child, and he is like a child and her name is Jenny Wren and I mentioned that because simultaneous with finishing this book, I was watching
The Beatles
documentary, the Peter Jackson
Beatles
documentary "Get Back" and probably like many people after seeing the episode in which Paul McCartney
, you know, writes "Get back" in the space of like 10 minutes of just kind of sheer and overwhelming genius.Share
55:42
I went down a
Paul McCartney
rabbit hole on Spotify, and he wrote a song called Jenny Wren, and I was just all set to just discover this hidden Dickens
fan and Paul McCartney
, especially after having interviewed Paul Muldoon
on the podcast and looked at his book of lyrics. I thought, well maybe, you know, there's no reason why he wouldn't write a song about the character Jenny Wren from "Our Mutual Friend", but to my disappointment, it's really about kind of a bird, like a woman sash bird, it's not about jenny wren of our mutual friend, but the song has been in my head ever since.Share
56:17
Alright, let's quickly run down the names of the books we read this week, starting with you, Greg.
Share
Gregory Cowles
56:22
I'm reading "Mercy Street" by
Jennifer Haigh
.Share
John Williams
56:25
I'm reading "After Me Comes the Flood" by
Sarah Perry.
Share
Pamela Paul
56:28
And I read
"Our Mutual Friend"
by Charles Dickens
.Share
56:36
Remember there's more at nytimes. com/books, and you can always write to us at books@nytimes. com, I write back, not right away, but I do
. The Book Review
podcast is produced by the great Pedro Rosado from Head Stepper Media, with a major assist for my colleague, John Williams. Thanks for listening for The New York Times
. I'm Pamela Paul
.Share
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Pamela Paul
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Alexandra Alter
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