Jonathan Raban talks to Jonathan Raban:
So its a novel this time. Your first?
No, but its been a long time between drinks. The last one Foreign
Land came out in 1985. But Waxwings is my first historical novel.
Historical? Its set around the turn of 1999/2000.
Doesnt the Millennium now seem almost as remote as the Eisenhower era?
In the winter of 1999 America was rich, and getting richer by the minute. It
was the age of irrational exuberance, as the Chairman of the Federal
Reserve nicely put it. And Seattle, where Waxwings takes place and where I live,
felt like the most happening city in the whole of the U.S. I remember going
to a Christmas party in 99, and talking to three women all in their
earlyish thirties sitting in line on a sofa and holding unsipped glasses
of champagne. Each of them was a paper millionaire, riding high on her stock-options.
By late March, when NASDAQ had begun to tank, they were all unmillionaires,
and now Seattle boasts one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation.
First the dot-com bubble burst, then came 9/11. The past is a foreign
country is the phrase that comes to mind, and the Seattle winter of 99
now seems like a strange and distant age of innocence. Yet all the clues to
the future were there to read right down to the arrest, in December 99,
of an Algerian al-Qaida terrorist at the Washington State border. The
WTO riots, the mayors emergency cancellation of the New Year festivities,
the jittery social high around Christmastime, the crash of the Seattle-bound
Alaskan Airlines flight in January, all look now like portents that we were
then too blind to see. One of the pleasures of writing the book was that of
course I knew the world that was waiting, just around the corner, for my characters,
but they didnt. Thats why its a historical novel.
When you were writing it, you muttered something about wanting Seattle,
the city, to be a major character in the book.
As you well know, Ive been writing obsessively for years about place,
about peoples place in place, and about their displacement in it. Seattles
a place where everyone seems to come from somewhere else, whether from England,
or China, or Nebraska, or New Jersey. In that sense, were all immigrants
here, whatever our original nationality and Seattle, more than most cities,
is a kind of repository of immigrant hopes and fantasies. From the new hire
at Microsoft to the fresh Korean face at the dry-cleaners, were
all new-lifers, somehow expecting Seattle to deliver our own version of The
American Dream, which puts a considerable strain on the rather makeshift and
threadbare social fabric of the city. The Seattle of Waxwings is a place
where everybody is busily trying to become someone else to be happier
and richer than the person he or she was before coming here and where
nobody feels quite at home. Its the national capital of self-reinvention.
The only character who is a Seattle native is four-year-old Finn, and hes
not a happy camper, marooned as he is in this society of chronic becomers. Finn,
a true child of Seattle in the 90s, is the touchstone-character at the
heart of the book.
Becomers, you say. Like Tom and Chick...
Thanks for the prompt. Yes, Tom Janeway arrives in the city legally, on a 747,
and Chick is an illegal who arrives in a container after a hideous voyage across
the Pacific on which two of his companions die. Ones a Hungarian-born
Englishman, the others a Chinese thief, but they are blood-brothers beneath
the skin, both captivated by the American Dream. Theyre a pair, like yin
and yang, systole and diastole. The Englishman is a bumbling, self-absorbed
intellectual, a writer, a regular commentator for NPRs All Things
Consid
sounds a lot like you...
Nonsense. Me self-absorbed? As I was saying... The Chinese guys a can-do
handyman; street-smart, quick on the uptake, someone designed by nature to become
an American. He has the guile it takes to reinvent oneself from scratch. He
is after Bill Gates Seattles most canny and competent citizen.
I had great fun writing him because he possesses all the qualities that I lack.
Looking out through Chicks eyes, I saw a world full of infinite possibility an
enviable view. Chicks progress through Seattle is as meteoric as the career
of any Internet entrepreneur, but its grounded in the solid and the actual;
in tangible things like houses, trees, asbestos, ships. The money he makes sticks
to him, unlike the fortunes that are made, and as quickly unmade, in the virtual
world.
You enjoyed writing Chick. What I enjoyed was building the company we call
GetaShack.com. Even in 2003, I still think weve got a business plan that
would work, if only we could find a venture capitalist to support us. Its
a classic 1990s Seattle enterprise, spinning money out of nothing much, by way
of the World Wide Web, and a lot more plausible than half of the real companies
that found their way on to the Nasdaq index and boomed extravagantly before
they went bust in 2000 and 2001. All we need is a sympathetic venture capitalist
and we could be coining money out of realtors, supermarkets, restaurants
we could be as big as Amazon...
Thats so Nineties. Anyway, we know that GetaShack probably folded. But
it boomed just long enough to make Tom Janeways wife, Beth, richer than
she could have dreamed of becoming when she left Smith College to pursue a career
in journalism. Beths lucky to catch the wave, and, when her options vest,
to have sufficient money to reinvent herself in a new mold...
...while her husband Tom, too old and otherwise preoccupied to reinvent
himself, is reinvented instead by other people, as the person of interest
in a particularly nasty case of child abduction and murder.
Well, Tom says near the beginning of the book that his ideal novel is one in
which almost nothing happens. As a writer, Tom dreams of being a kind of Nicholson
Baker. But its his fate to live in a novel where rather a lot of things,
none of them welcome, happen to him. Imagine Nicholson Baker appearing on Americas
Most Wanted... But Tom pretty much deserves what he gets: his wife exasperatedly
describes him as like fog in human form, with his literary allusions
and his air of general abstraction from the world. Becoming a suspect in a murder
case is just what he needs to wake him up. I feel a lot of sympathy with Detective
Paul Nagel, the officer in the King County Sheriffs Department whose job
it is to bully Tom back into reality.
You are an Englishman. Youve lived in America for more than a decade,
but even so, dont you think youre being a bit as they say
in England previous, to be writing an American novel?
Oh, its not an American novel. At least, I dont think of it as
that. I think of it more as an English social comedy which happens to be set
squarely in an American city. While I was writing it I read the complete works
of E.M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, and P.G. Wodehouse. Theyre the very English
tutelary deities who haunt Waxwings. You cant become an American
writer just by spending a dozen years here. The voice inside your head, your
jokes, your essential preconceptions, they all remain obstinately English. Your
accent still sometimes baffles the girl at the supermarket checkout. You still,
on dozy mornings, sometimes try to let yourself into the right-hand side of
the car (you do, Ive noticed). Writing as an American would be an act
of futile impersonation. I hope I can now write as an authentic denizen of an
American city, but thats rather different. To be a foreigner in America
is a very American condition, but one shouldnt forget or deny ones
foreignness and for a writer a certain foreignness is more asset than
weakness.
So you wont be applying for citizenship any time soon?
Hardly that would mean giving up my green card, and the official title
that describes me better than any title Ive had in my entire life, Resident
Alien. Im not an American writer; Im a Resident Alien writer.
But Americas your home now.
When I first came to live here, in 1990, I thought it would take just a year
or two to feel perfectly at home. Nearly thirteen years on, thats still
not true. The longer I live here, the more aware I am of my status as a stranger.
I still get things wrong, still have to watch my step... And the incomers and
immigrants in Waxwings are like that, learning, like college freshmen,
by imitation and by trial and error, how to live in a strange new world.
I seem to remember that when you started on the Ph.D. thesis that you never
finished, about a hundred years ago, before you had ever even visited the United
States, its title was something like The Theme of Immigration in the Jewish-American
Novel from 1874 to 1964. Long before you actually became an immigrant,
you had a professional interest in immigrants to the U.S...
No-one studies America more closely than the recent immigrant, and if you want
to gauge the national temper at any one moment of history, just read the minds
of immigrants in that period. So I hope that Chick and Tom between them catch
something of the spirit of America in the late twentieth century in a way that
native-born characters would not. And even the native-born the dot-commers are
like immigrants; new to Seattle, working in the uncharted territory of a brand-new
industry, theyre greenhorns too.
You and I disagreed about the title. You overruled me. Why Waxwings?
Ive never been able to interest you in watching birds. You paid no attention
when we saw that flock of cedar waxwings. They seemed to come out of nowhere a
hundred of them, at least. They settled on a tree, stripped it of its berries,
and flew on, in search of the next tree to depredate. I thought: immigrants!
You sneered. I looked them up in the bird book. They travel great distances
to feed. Apparently, they often gorge themselves to the point where they fall
out of trees, drunk on berry-juice and too heavy to fly. You find them lying
on their backs in the grass, sozzled out of their tiny minds. Seattle in the
90s was just like a holly tree a magnet for hungry travelers from
afar. The book is named for the birds, but if you want to hear an echo of the
Icarus story in the title, thats okay too.
Remind me of what youre writing now.
Another novel, also set in the Pacific Northwest.
So unlike the waxwings you wont be leaving Seattle in
the near future?
No. It may not be an altogether easy place to live in and I do sometimes
hanker for the fleshpots of London or New York but I cant think of
a more interesting city in which to find oneself, or to write about, than post-millennial
Seattle. So, like it or lump it, were here to stay.