Believe! Heidi Julavits Has Emerged from Her Tennis-Ball Canister!
Dave Weich, Powells.com
DISCUSSED: Discussion Guidelines, The Big Terrible, Sisters, Academic Conference Papers Circa 1988, Fright Distance, Titling, Lost Documentation, Role-Playing, Literature of Confinement, The Perfect Novel, Bruce Jay Friedman, The Believer's Agenda, Woodworking, The Vocabulary of Flowers
 "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!" ran the bold type across the first full page of The Believer's debut edition. The essay that followed meant to start an argument, and it succeeded; Julavits, articles editor for the fledgling McSweeney's periodical, got people in the book industry talking immediately. Prominently, the magazine's cover announced, "The Snarky, Dumbed-Down World of Book Reviewing: We're sick and tired and really excited." Either you're with us or you're not, it seemed to be saying, and if you're not that's fine, but kindly get out of the way.
Now, more life out on the limb: Julavits's second novel manages the neat trick of entertaining while relating the story of a hijacking. The Effect of Living Backwards is a book about sisters. About identity. About choices. "A wonderfully absurdist game of chess," Aimee Bender called it. The hijacking at the center of the story may have been staged to test the passengers' reactions. The blind terrorist may, in fact, have his vision. Alice and Edith can't say for sure.
"In one fell swoop," author George Saunders marveled, "Heidi Julavits establishes herself as the Scheherazade of the new Anti-Terror Age. Funny, unnerving, sophisticated, and dazzling in the range of its invention, The Effect of Living Backwards is a terrific and important addition to our literature."
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"Insightful and challenging, this oddball story is unforgettable. Julavits succeeds admirably in making the transition from her prior dramatic novel...to this quick-witted black comedy." Library Journal
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"Julavits...perfectly captures the siren call of adolescent women, and the aftermath of those who are lured in. Potent and intoxicating: a dangerously seductive book." Kirkus Reviews
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"The Mineral Palace is a marvelous debut novel: harrowing, poetic and tragic enough to satisfy both Faulkner and Oprah." Newsweek
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Heidi Julavits and Jenny Gage
Combining lurid, surreal photographs by Jenny Gage with Heidi Julavits' penchant for the giddily sinister, Hotel Andromeda provides a wicked meditation on girlhood, alienation and the perversions born from being watched in isolation.
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Featuring "Marry the One Who Gets There First" by Heidi Julavits. Also included: stories by Nathan Englander, Alice Munro, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lorrie Moore, Aleksandar Hemon, and more.
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"Ben Marcus is a genius, one of the most daring, funny, morally engaged and brilliant writers, someone whose work truly makes a difference in the world. His prose is, for me, awareness objectified ? he makes the word new and thus the world." George Saunders
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"The guy has nailed me with his deadpan. Not since the late Donald Barthelme have we had such a pitch-perfect surrealizing of domestic American life..." Sven Birkerts, Esquire
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"Sharply pointed, finely delivered observations on world politics and the ongoing war on terrorism." Kirkus Reviews
Dave: I don't usually come prepared with printouts, but see, I have
here a list of potential topics we could talk about.
Heidi Julavits: Crazy.
Dave: Well, the problem is that they're not actually questions. There's
only one question mark on the entire page.
Julavits: They're just observations?
Dave: Right. Which is why even when I prepare I'll occasionally get
into trouble once the conversation begins.
Julavits: I see. Because there's no question there.
Dave: Exactly. I'll just say something and then there's a pregnant
pause as the author waits for me to get to the question.
Julavits: You say something, and I say, "Huh."
Dave: Or, better, you take the topic somewhere.
Julavits: That's actually a good interviewing technique, though. It
challenges people to find the question in the statement, right?
Dave: When it works, you, the author, can address the topic in the
way you find most relevant. Because it might be a worthwhile topic, but how
am I supposed to know what's most interesting to you about it? I only met you
ten minutes ago.
Julavits: That's true. No leading questions here. So you just say something.
We could be associative. Just exchange words back and forth.
Dave: I've often thought of sitting down and reading aloud a series
of short excerpts from the author's book. I can read back what they've written
and they can take it wherever they want. No questions at all.
Julavits: This is sounding like Lacanian
therapy.
Dave: Why don't we start with the most obvious thing, and hopefully
that will lead somewhere.
Julavits: Okay.
Dave: The word on the street is that you'd finished the first draft
of The Effect
of Living Backwards two weeks before 9-11. How did the book change after
that?
Julavits: It had to change on a practical level, as opposed to tonal
or jacking up the paranoia or whatever. Basically, the biggest change is that
prior to 9-11 the typical captive response to being hijacked was to sit back
and wait until the situation improved; don't call attention to yourself because
you'll get a bullet in the head. Obviously, that choice is still there. Is every
hijacker from now on going to use a plane as a bomb or will they be doing things
the old-fashioned way? If they are doing things the old-fashioned way,
you don't want to tackle them because you might wind up killing everyone on
board. So 9-11 introduced lots of new decisions and options that had to be weighed
by the hostages, my characters.
Also, I wasn't so crazy about setting this in a particular time period. I
was interested in the not-so-distant future, but not specified. That suited
the absurdist tone I was going for. To try to attach it to a specific period
in time made me feel like I was limited in what I could and couldn't do. All
of a sudden, it's like, This is a realist novel. Once 9-11 happened,
I had to decide, Did this happen before or after?
I ended up referring to it euphemistically with the phrase that Thomas
Friedman was using in his column in the Times, which was "The Big
Terrible." I reference it once in a while without actually talking about it.
It's a ghost presence.
Dave: And yet beyond all that, the book is about two sisters. Ultimately
the novel is about Alice and Edith.
Julavits: I see it as a love story between two people who hate each
other, which is my favorite kind of love story, you know? It is, ultimately,
a family drama, but on a plane with a hijacking and all this other stuff.
It's interesting, though. I was on a radio program in New York NPR,
Leonard Lopate, which I love; it's totally great, I listen to him all the time,
and I'm always happy to go on that show; he's fantastic. But I was sitting in
the waiting room, waiting to go on (it's live, so everyone shuffles in with
their cello or whatever they're doing, then they shuffle out), and they were
announcing, "Next will be Heidi Julavits with her book that explores family
tensions." And I was thinking, Seriously, what does a woman have to do? There's
politics and hijacking and terrorism, but it's still a family drama. I don't
deny that's in there it absolutely is but if a guy wrote this
book, they'd say, "It's about terrorism."
Still, I agree with you: it's about all those things. And obviously my publisher
was very happy to say that it was a love story between two sisters. They didn't
want to mention the H word.
Dave: Edith says at one point, "I decided to make everything that happened
to me appear as if I'd engineered it." Alice says similar things at other times.
They're both role-playing. All their lives, they've been playing off each other.
Julavits: Absolutely. To be honest and this is going to contradict
what I just said yes, it's a love story about people who hate each other;
yes, there's terrorism; yes, yes, yes. But to me, it's an identity book. Not
Who am I? and I know this sounds so academic conference paper
circa 1988 but it's about how identity is constructed. All these people
have fake identities. Even the people who supposedly have real identities, you
also start to peel those away and everything feels engineered.
Dave: And it just keeps on peeling.
Julavits: Right.
Dave: I really like the concept of "fright distances." Where did that
come from?
Julavits: I made it up. There's something called "flight distance."
I'm pretty sure that's actually a term. Every animal has a different flight
distance. If I were to scare you, you would run twenty feet from me. If I were
to scare the flea you have on your arm, the flea would hop two millimeters or
whatever. So I was messing around with that.
Dave: But you take it beyond physical distance.
Julavits: Right, I ended up messing with the concept and having it
be misunderstood by the daughters of this entomologist.
Once something is misunderstood, you can take it anywhere. Those things that
as a kid make no conceptual sense to you? I remember the whole idea of
"untouchables" in India. I thought, That means they must be the highest-highest,
right? You can't touch those people. So then trying to reconcile that they're
the lowest of the low?
Dave: In terms of constructing histories, last night I read
now I'm forgetting the title? "Marry the One Who Gets There First" [from Best
American Short Stories 1999].
Julavits: Yes. Not my title. Not. My. Title.
Dave: Do you have one you'd like to use instead?
Julavits: Actually, no. The title I had was no better, so I shouldn't
say anything. I just wanted it to be "Outtakes from the Sheidegger-Krupnik Wedding
Album."
Dave: Which is now the subtitle.
Julavits: Right.
Dave: You structured that story around photos discarded from a wedding
album, which reminded me thematically of the father's films in Living
Backwards.
Julavits: Yes. It's this whole idea of lost documentation. Those films
are locked away in a storage unit in Des Moines, Iowa, so no one's actually
seen them for a long time. Alice and Edith are operating on the memory of a
film, which is always complicated. Everyone's had the experience where you'll
have seen pictures as a kid, then you can't remember if you're remembering the
experience or the picture of the experience. These two sisters end up having
this huge fight over what happened in one of these movies.
Dave: Alice and Edith, quite self-consciously, engineer their identities
over the years. You, meanwhile? As a writer, you've published short stories
here and there, but your first novel was very different from this one.
Julavits: Role-playing! I was role-playing the serious novelist.
Dave: Because you felt like you should be serious at the time? The
best quote I read, and I can't remember where I found it, but after The
Mineral Palace was published your brother tried to convince a reporter that
you really were funnier than you seemed from the book.
Julavits: It's true. I don't know. Even now, I sit down and read that
book and I wonder, Who wrote this? And Whose idea was it to write
this? I love a book that's flat-out brutal and depressing, but I don't know
that I want to be known as a person who writes those books.
I guess I feel like I wasn't really using all my abilities in that book. I
definitely had to turn off the irreverent, humorous side of my head entirely.
It felt okay at the time, but definitely at the end I was getting tired of that,
which is why I think the second book happened so quickly. I was so claustrophobic
in that other world. I didn't even take a break. I started writing this one
right away.
So maybe that's the key: Write something that makes you feel like you're in
a box. Then the next book, you break out. The problem is what to do with the
third book.
Dave: I was thrilled to see that you cited Donald
Antrim as a role model for the new novel, in terms of working with a character
in a confined setting. He's one of my favorites. But then you broke the rules
you'd set for yourself.
Julavits: It didn't work out. I swear, I'll do it someday. In fact,
the next book I'm working on, I'm trying to have the main character be in the
bathtub for the entire book. Again, it's not working.
I think I'm going to keep experimenting with ways to keep characters in confined
spaces because, honestly, I read The
Verificationist as I was finishing my first book, and I was so impressed.
It's so concise. It's a big book with so much going on, but it's like
boom! a punch to the gut. You can read it in a few hours. And
also, he has the literal Bernhardian
confinement: instead of man-in-wingback-chair, it's man-in-perpetual-bear-hug.
Reading the book, you could sense how the act of this character being squashed
and stifled by a colleague let Donald's mind go wild.
I wanted to try to have that experience myself. I was seeing my characters,
and by extension me, in a tennis-ball canister: the plane. The shame stories
came out of the fact that I was feeling confined. That's how it happened. I
didn't really set out to write a book structurally in that way, but because
I was feeling so hot and bothered in that airplane, that's how I was letting
myself out.
Dave: Another reference to Donald: One of my favorite, strange literary
sex scenes appears in Elect
Mr. Robinson for a Better World, the scene in the couple's backyard. I thought
you did a damn good job of matching that at the end of this book.
Julavits: Interesting! In the non-sex sex scene?!
Dave: Whatever you want to call it.
Julavits: Those are the best sex scenes, where there's actually no
action.
Dave: Well, we don't want to give everything away. There will be
action.
Julavits: Sorry. There's so much sex in this book! There's tons of
sex. Or, at least, there's an adequate, perfectly decent amount of sex.
Dave: Good.
Okay, confinement? Maybe you've forgotten about it by now, but you wrote an
essay that a lot of people were talking about in the spring.
Julavits: What was the title?
Dave: I don't remember. I saw it in a magazine somewhere. But you talked
about, among other things, the idea of "the ambitious book." You mentioned Underworld,
which I think is a great example.
Julavits: Yes. And good, I think, because it's not a perfect book,
whatever people mean by that. What is a perfect book? Who decides? Is there
a book that everyone agrees, "Oh, yes, indeed, this is a perfect book"? But part of what is impressive about Underworld is the flaws, in a
way. The way it just runs wild on itself, that's part of what makes it so incredible.
Dave: Because of what it's willing to take on.
Julavits: Totally. It's like a bar-raiser. I just remember reading
that book and thinking, Okay, the bar has been raised.
Dave: I finished The
Effect of Living Backwards the day before yesterday, and I haven't entirely
wrapped my mind around it yet. You need to figure
certain things out to understand what's going on, which takes time because in
the beginning there's a lot of misdirection and noise. And this is a completely leading
question, but here goes: Maybe it's not a "perfect"
novel, but how would anything great ever get written if authors weren't overly
ambitious?
Julavits: Absolutely. And in a way, I'm amazed so far with this book.
I don't want to say I've been let off the hook, but people have asked whether
I think the book has been reviewed differently because of what I wrote, and
my first response is, "I hope not." Ben
[Marcus] actually said, when he read my Times review, "You're so lucky.
They don't typically like books that are weird." The reviewer indicated he was
a little annoyed with it, but that's much better than dismissing it out of hand,
which is what they often do with books that aren't easy to fully get.
Who knows? If anything in that essay makes a critic think twice, I hope it's
that. There are all sorts of things that will never change it's a matter
of numbers and pure ad dollars and all sorts of other things but if people
will give just a little more room when they're reviewing something and not put
a wall up right away. Give it room to not work, but at least see what it's trying
to do.
That was a big issue with this book. I had to fight a lot with my editor because
a number of drafts ago she didn't think it worked. I agreed, but I said,
"I know it doesn't work, but I want to make it work. If it doesn't work perfectly
that's okay with me, but I don't want to take these scenes out." She wanted
to take the shame stories out. I was like, "If we take them out, this isn't
interesting to me anymore."
That was a big change for me from my first book, where I was trying to play
around with a lot of stuff and I chickened out. Part of it, I felt like I wasn't
good enough. Not that I'm "good enough" now, but I felt like I needed a little
more practice then. With the first book, I backed down and tried to say, "Okay,
instead of the bells and whistles I'm just going to try to write a straight
narrative."
When I was a student, in a class with a teacher, to work with lots of small pieces was easier
for me than to make something that was one big piece. Sort of like the Best
American story. With The Mineral Palace I thought, Alright, I can't do that
very well. I keep making things piecemeal so I better go
and figure out how to make one big whole. Anyway, now I'm back to pieces. I think I'm back forever
now.
Dave: Part of The Believer's agenda as you've expressed it is
to turn readers on to books and authors they don't know. So what has editing
the magazine turned you on to?
Julavits: A lot of stuff. That's what fabulous about this. For example,
Bruce
Jay Friedman. Do you know him?
Dave: No.
Julavits: It's funny because no one our age has heard of him. Well,
Ben has because he's actually a fifty-year-old in a thirty-five-year-old's body.
But I gave a reading in what is known here as the "other" Portland: Portland,
Maine. Someone asked me a question like this and I mentioned Bruce Jay Friedman. Everybody there because, of course, it was all my parents' friends
they'd all heard of him, they'd all read him. It was crazy.
He's from Brooklyn. He wrote a book called The
Dick. I think what happened to him and this is according to the essay,
which I'm currently editing the character was very racist. Then the question
is, Is the author racist? Conflating the ideas in the book with the person
who created it. Anatole Boyard, I guess, reviewed it for the Times and
just buried him forever and ever. Rest in peace. One of those reviews you don't
come back from. But Friedman is someone who has really influenced a lot of people.
I guess Woody
Allen has put him in his movies, given him cameos. He actually wrote a book
that's very much like Portnoy's
Complaint, but he did it about five years beforehand. I kind of agree with
the thesis that this writer is working on, which is that sometimes when the
first person does it, it opens a door, but it's the next person who gets all
the credit. Bruce Jay Friedman was a trendsetter in all these ways, but whoever
walked those paths next, they're the ones we think of culturally as being the
instigators of these things. So he's one.
Another example, not a book that I discovered but one that I was prompted
to go back and reread: Sven
Birkerts just turned in a review on The
Moviegoer by Walker
Percy. Or, not a review exactly. He had been reading that book by Paul
Elie that just came out [The
Life You Save May Be Your Own] about writers who are very Christian in their
life and their writing like Flannery
O'Connor and Walker Percy. He'd been reading that, and it sent him back
to read The Moviegoer. He talks about the idea of the quest and the search.
Is it religious? Is it not religious? Was it religious for him at the time?
Et cetera.
At this point, most of the "discovery" pieces are pieces that I've assigned,
so I've discovered the authors already. Hopefully that will start to change.
But writers like Steve
Erickson; he was someone I was just dying to have covered and written about.
Dave: That must be one of the most satisfying parts of the job.
Julavits: Completely. You do it with your friends, push books on them,
but now you get to do it with thousands of people. These people totally deserve
it, I think. With other pieces like the Bruce Jay Friedman, this guy just made
a good case, and I said, "Go for it. He sounds really interesting."
Dave: I think it's time to stop. What time do you have?
Julavits: My watch says 10:12, but it's very fast and it's three hours
off. East coast time.
Dave: Oh, wait. The clock says it's only 7:05. We have plenty of time.
Five bonus minutes with Heidi Julavits.
Let's forget about the new book and The Believer and definitions of
snark. What do you like to talk about? It could be anything? Gardening?
Julavits: Well, it's funny you mention it because I was just going
to say that. We live in Maine, as you know. It's really far away from most produce
centers of the United States, so you can't get a lot of things up there. By
default, I've become a gardener. I like arugula. I like escarole. I like these
things that you can't buy, so I've become a gardener. Then this year I started
to get into flowers, but I've found that I don't have the vocabulary for it.
You need a special vocabulary to grow flowers. I went to the Farmer's Market,
and I bought a rose bush. The man gave me this whole spiel: "You gotta cut it
to the five-leaf and bury it and?"
I walked away, and I said to Ben, "Did you understand anything he said?" No,
he didn't understand either. So I went back, and I said, "I just want to clarify.
The five-leaf." He says, "Yeah, just cut to the five-leaf," and so on. I said,
"Okay, great," but I still didn't know what he was talking about. Then I was
just in Seattle with my sister-in-law, who is an exquisite gardener. I said,
"Roses: I need to know, how do you do this and that?" And she said, "Well, you
just cut to the five-leaf..."
It's sort of like when you've never had a computer and you call for tech help.
They start talking in that other language at you. I don't even have the words
to communicate with you what is wrong with my computer. I will send you a drawing.
So we've actually both, Ben and I, become profoundly un-literary and possibly
uninteresting since we moved to Maine. He basically just talks about wood. He
has become really into woodworking.
Dave: That's a new direction for him. When he was here last year he
was looking to get away from his obsession with wind and breath.
Julavits: It's true. Exactly. And he's found it: it's woodworking.
Dave: What has he built?
Julavits: He's building us a bed right now, as all good husbands should!
He said it sucks, though. I talked to him today. Our neighbor across the street
is a master carpenter at the wooden boat building yard, which E.
B. White's grandson runs so you see the woodworking and literary
dovetailing that goes on up there. He came over to look at it, and he was like,
"Hmm." Ben said he didn't say anything.
If we're up there too much longer we won't even be able to give book interviews
any more. We'll be tossing around words like "five-leaf" and "the rabbit."
Dave: The real-life living.
Julavits: That we all dream of.
Dave: And there go our five minutes. I guess that's enough. I've had
enough of you now.
Julavits: Good. I think I have, too, thank you.
Heidi lives with her husband, author Ben Marcus, splitting time between Brooklyn, New York, and Brooklin, Maine. On the drive from one to the other they pass the dirt road that leads to the house where I spent twenty summers with my family. Heidi went to Deering High, a couple hours south in Portland, it turns out, with the brother of my college roommate.
Ben visited Powell's last summer. When he was here, he bought Heidi a book about Danish Modern furniture.
Heidi Julavits visited Powell's City of Books on July 8, 2003.
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