PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.

[Editor's note: The following is a reprint of our 2005 interview with John Irving, whose new novel, Last Night in Twisted River, has just come out in hardcover. Click here to get signed editions while they last!]

On one list are the books you like to recommend. You want to turn someone on to your favorite unknown author or introduce them to the season's latest, greatest novel. If you've read widely enough over the years, you'll match reader to occasion. The list comes to include something for just about anyone in any setting:

Funny books and smart ones; easy and hard; books that teach and those that entertain; pages best turned at the beach, on a plane, or sick in bed; a pick for the woman you want to impress or the friend who reads mostly in ten-minute bursts between cab fares; dry, plotless affairs that ease you toward sleep or blazers that set your mind racing, keep you up late into the night...

A much shorter list contains the sure bets ? the ones that work for just about any reader, young or old, anywhere, at any time. A Prayer for Owen Meany may be the only book on my second list.

You get OWEN MEANY'S SQUEAKY VOICE into a person's head and the worst they'll ever say is they loved it. Without fail, they will thank you. [See our guarantee.] Three people I've given it to, years and oceans apart, reported back that it had become their favorite novel of all-time.

"Which one do I read next?" they all ask, so swiftly converted. (Often they're not even done with the book and already they're planning ahead. Anxiety has set in, a debilitating abandonment neurosis symptomatic of the last hundred pages.) Tell them, "Take your pick." The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, The Hotel New Hampshire, A Widow for One Year...

This summer, John Irving will publish Until I Find You, possibly his most personal book to date. "Here it is my eleventh novel," he considers, "but I think this character, Jack Burns, is more fully developed than any character in any novel I've written."

÷ ÷ ÷

Dave: The Fourth Hand offered a much more abbreviated vision of its characters' lives than we typically see in your books. We don't meet Patrick and Doris until they're adults.

John Irving: The Fourth Hand was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing. It was a vision of a book, like a movie, that did not have the passage of time as a major or minor character. For that reason, it was more manageable, shorter.

Until I Find You, which has been six-and-a-half years in the works, is a lot more like The Cider House Rules or A Prayer for Owen Meany. It has that scope, that passage of time, that circumference about it. It's a bildungsroman; it's about the overall education of a character. The childhood is principal.

Dave: Those screenplays would seem to give you a useful detachment from projects that otherwise demand immersion for very long periods of time.

Irving: They do. I think it's all to your advantage that you can step away from something as many times as you can, but it's very hard to have the discipline to do that.

If you're writing along and it's going well and everything is flowing consecutively, are you going to get up one morning and say, "God, this novel is going swimmingly. I think I'll put it in a drawer and not look at it for two months"? No. It's hard to do that. I don't have the discipline to do that. But when these other projects are floating out there, these screenplays in varying degrees of completion, they give you the option to turn away.

Screenplays don't go into production because of the writer, the way novels do. You don't know when that interruption is going to occur. You don't know whether it's going to last two months or three months or four months, but when it happens, given the nature of how they make movies, you have to give in to it. You have to leave whatever novel you're writing; you have to put that to the side.

The first time that happened, I deeply resented it. When I went back to that novel, however, I saw things about it that I never would have seen if I had been focused on that project alone. So I recognized the virtue of being interrupted.

For that reason alone, I love the existence of these screenplays in my life. They have, beginning with A Prayer for Owen Meany, improved my novels. I keep interrupting them and coming back to them and seeing things I never would have seen.

Dave: I saw in the Times that you learned how to tattoo while researching material for the new book. Did you have any talent for it? You actually applied a tattoo, right?

Irving: I did, but I have to confess: I have no talent for it, and I feel very badly for the woman whose forearm I mangled.

The research in my novels is pretty carefully delineated. I have to do it: the OB-GYN with Dr. Larch in The Cider House Rules, the orthopedic surgery in A Son of the Circus, the business of granite quarrying and being a body escort in A Prayer for Owen Meany, even the prostitutes in A Widow for One Year. I feel I have to be the dutiful journalist. I have to put myself in the hands of someone whose life that is and learn it. You just have to know that stuff or you shouldn't write about it.

It works in well with my system; namely that I have to know everything of emotional importance about a novel, especially where it ends, before I even think about writing the first sentence. So while I'm taking notes it's good to have these

Winner of a Caldecott Medal, a Newbery Medal, and two Christopher Awards, David Small is one of the most acclaimed graphic artists in his field.

After illustrating more than forty books for children, now he has turned his attention to his own childhood, creating one of the most visceral and arresting (not to mention gorgeous) memoirs of the decade.

In the apt words of Jules Feiffer, Stitches is "a profound and moving gift of graphic literature that has the look of a movie and reads like a poem."

At the age of eleven, Small developed a growth on his neck. His parents, without explanation (and clearly not lacking for money or access), withheld treatment for more than three years. Two surgeries later, at fourteen, the young boy was left with a rash of stitches up his neck and a missing vocal cord that rendered him unable to speak.

"Something remarkable has happened because of [Stitches], already," Small mentioned just before our phone call ran its course. He then proceeded to share one of those incredible anecdotes that, as the person conducting the interview, you can't believe you almost missed capturing. "If nothing else happens with this book," he concluded, "it would be worth doing it just for that."

The author was kind enough to follow up our conversation by sharing further thoughts about several subjects of particular fascination. His email is copied at the bottom of this post.

÷ ÷ ÷

David Small: I'm thrilled that Powell's has chosen Stitches for Indiespensable.

Dave: We'll be sending the book, in its custom slipcase, to 850 subscribers. This is the 13th title we've picked for the program, but it's the first that's not a traditional text narrative. We think Stitches will be a good introduction to illustrated narratives for readers who are less familiar with them.

Small: Before I made this, I wasn't a graphic novels fan, by any means. I just hadn't found anything that struck me. I do read a lot of fiction. I keep rereading Flaubert, James, Tolstoy... So I was curious about graphic novels, and I'd looked at some. I was impressed with Maus, both volumes. Chris Ware's artwork has always impressed me.

Then, about four years ago, Sarah and I were in Paris. A very close friend, a Parisian illustrator, had a son who was working on a graphic novel. We went over to his apartment. Pierre showed me work by Nicholas de Crécy, and a book that he did with Sylvain Chomet, who had done The Triplets of Belleville. That made me perk up. They used to work together. They apparently went to art school together and developed very similar styles.

They did a series of books that were compiled into something called Léon La Came: Laid, Pauvre et Malade (Ugly, Broke and Sick). It's a comic treatment of some very serious themes. Very French. Neo-Nazis are always hovering in the background. I think collaborationism comes into question. It's all treated the same as Triplets. Anyway, then he showed me work by a couple other artists, as well. There was a cinematic quality to the ones I was attracted to. The French are great cinephiles.

I was in college in the sixties when movies really got good. I'm a fan of Bergman and Hitchcock and Polanski and Antonioni. Those are my gods. I've studied those films closer than anything, aside from the classical artists I liked back in grad school.

Sarah and I came back to Michigan, and I guess it had been fermenting in my mind for a couple weeks. She tells me that I started coming home from the studio in the evenings, and I'd fix myself a martini, sit down at the kitchen table, and draw like crazy on this memoir. It just started pouring out.

Dave: After working on more than forty books for kids, you've created one about yourself, for adults. Had you been meaning to tell the story for a long time?

Small: I had. About ten years ago, I sent my agent a chapter of a story. I didn't know if it was going to be autobiography or fiction, but it came from a real incident, that scene in the hospital corridor where little David discovers the homunculus in a jar. That really terrifying incident had stayed in my mind all my life, and that's how I had begun a memoir-like work.

Holly got very excited about it. [Editor's note: Holly McGhee is Small's agent.] She also loved a little drawing of myself that I'd sent along with it. She said, "This is going to be your book," but I always knew, in the back of my mind, that it was never going to be a book if I had to do it in prose. I'm not a writer. I know a lot of writers; I know a handful of really excellent, great ones, and I know what they're like. They are in love with language. They're obsessed with it. Even if their thoughts aren't more special than anybody else's, they have a way of putting them into words that makes them sensational. And I knew that I'm not that kind of writer.

So I knew that I was never going to write a novel, but the idea had been there for a long, long time. And, besides, I couldn't remember anything except that one incident, specifically. Then when I started drawing it out, that's what was so exciting: Once I started drawing and bringing all those ghosts back, I was amazed at the files that were in my head and accessible. Unbelievable. This wasn't stuff I wanted to revisit, but it became just as exciting as anything else I was doing to see how much more I could remember.

Here I am getting older ? I'm supposed to be forgetting ? and I could remember more than I'd ever thought possible. It's funny what will come to you. I don't know where I found it, but there's a quote by Sylvain Chomet that goes, "The memory improves the more you lay burdens on it." So contradictory to what everybody thinks.

Dave: What did you learn about yourself in the process?

Small: That I was in need of more psychoanalysis. I never thought I needed more therapy after what I'd had for ten years when I was a teenager, but the older I got the more I had to admit that on some level I was stil

The New York Times calls Shop Class as Soulcraft "a beautiful little book about human excellence and the way it is undervalued in contemporary America." Kyle here at Powell's calls it "an accessible, carefully reasoned examination of work and America's evolving ideas about it." The author, himself, explains, "I want to suggest we can take a broader view of what a good job might consist of, and therefore what kind of education is important."

Excerpts from an interview with Gerbrand Bakker, author of The Twin (the 11th selection of Powell's Indiespensable program): "When I started The Twin something else happened. I sat down and wrote the first sentence. Later that sentence ('I've put Father upstairs.') was praised by all kinds of critics, but it just rolled out. Tick-tick-tick and there it was one morning...."

If Carl Hiaasen set one of his novels on a residential stretch of boundary line between British Columbia and Washington, or if Richard Russo's characters had relatives in the Pacific Northwest, the result might be something like Jim Lynch's Border Songs.

Twelve-year-old T.S. Spivet draws maps of train routes and water tables, maps of loneliness, the resilience of memory, even a map of his sister shucking corn. Author Reif Larsen notes, "I think I'm gently expanding the definition of the word map."

And about those maps: Larsen, the son of two artists, created them himself. "I got almost all the way through the draft before I realized that we needed to see T.S.'s maps and his diagrams," the novelist explains. "That's the territory of his heart."

When T.S.'s work is honored by the Smithsonian ? the institute naturally assumes that T.S. is an adult ? he runs away from home in Divide, Montana, and hoboes his way to Washington, D.C. An adventure story, a family saga, and a format-busting beauty (T.S.'s drawings appear on more than half the pages, mostly in sidebars and cutaways alongside the main body of text), The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is a revelation. "Read it and marvel," Bookpage recommends.

"Here is a book that does the impossible," Stephen King commended. "It combines Mark Twain, Thomas Pynchon, and Little Miss Sunshine. This book is a treasure."

÷ ÷ ÷

Dave: First, the book is a lot of fun.

Reif Larsen: It was fun to write. Waking up every day and writing, I felt like I was along for the ride. Where will it take me next?

Dave: There's mystery and adventure... but on a deeper level it's a novel about mortality, uncertainty, about life. Did the energy of the adventure help you get wrapped up in the story day after day?

Larsen: Very early on, I discovered the voice of T.S. I knew that I wanted to write about cowboys and westerns, and I knew I wanted to tackle it from the point of view of the son of a cowboy. Initially, T.S. was fifty-seven-years-old, narrating from a Parisian prison, drunk. That was going to be a very different book, obviously. But then I realized, No, he's not drunk. He's not in Paris. He's still on the ranch. And he's twelve, actually.

One of the central tensions is that he views the world very differently than his father, who is a nostalgic, cowboy intuitionist. T.S. is a hyper-analytical kid who can't process the world without diagramming it. Once I found that tension and found T.S.'s voice, the novel unfolded. I kept asking, "What's going to happen next?"

The scene in Chicago, when he stabs that crazy preacher guy ? I was totally shocked when that happened. For a couple days, I walked around like a zombie. My girlfriend wondered what was going on, and I'd be saying, "He might have just killed someone."

It was weird, sharing the feeling of discovery that the reader experiences. It's a little different because I was the creator, but the arc of the book had an urgency that was surprising to me. I did a lot of comedy improv in college, and I learned early on as a writer that I needed to build uncertainty into my process, to allow myself room to be surprised in the middle of a sentence. Something crazy comes out, and then you take that to its conclusion. That's how I keep it fresh and don't make myself go crazy.

Dave: False starts must be part of the process for you, then.

Larsen: Yes. It's like throwing paint down. You have to get it down and not edit yourself in the beginning.

A lot of beginning writers are horrified of what they first write. They want to brush away the tracks as quickly as possible. I was like that.

I'm convinced that whatever we write the first time is terrible. It's just a matter of becoming more comfortable knowing that in your second or third or fourth pass you'll clean it up. Put it in now and cut it out later. I had about ten times the number of digressions in the book that I do now.

Dave: I feel like I should ask, in a very serious, Barbara Walters-like tone, "Who is T.S. Spivet?"

Larsen: Who is T.S. Spivet? I don't know.

He's the narrator, he's the protagonist, and yet there's an odd etherealness about him. He floats above everything in some ways. People might want to turn him into the everyman. That's what happened to T.S. in Washington; he got turned into a symbol.

For all the bells and whistles on its surface, the book is a classic novel in many senses. The story has been told many times. It's a road book, a journey book, a coming-of-age book. We're watching T.S. emerge into a form of adolescence or adulthood. He's realizing himself as a player on the stage. All kids go through that. His story is a little more dramatic because he possesses this incredible skill set, spatializing the world, but in important ways he has very similar struggles to other twelve-year-olds.

Twelve is an interesting age. You're starting to gain the vocabulary and symbol recognition of adulthood, but you're still mired within the magical thinking of childhood. It was a very intentional choice on my part to position him as such.

Dave: He can't do anything that his father wants him to. It's actually his deficiencies that set him on the journey. There's that wonderful moment when he thinks his dog is trying to tell him that he's needed on the ranch. And he's surprised.

Larsen: That's really important, too. There's a risk to label him a genius and be done with it, but he is very much twelve. He lacks a real emotional vocabulary, which he starts to gain over the course of the book.

One of my favorite scenes is when he's in the MRI, being scanned, as a child prodigy, and the scientist asks him to perform a really difficult math equation. He's like, "Lady, I haven't even taken pre-algebra."

There's an assumption on adults' part that he can do anything. And it's exactly what you say: It's what he can't do. He might trade in all his mapping abilities to have the same kind of comfort and intuition on the ranch that his father does.

Dave: Take me through you process, step-by-step, creating the book's layout. How were the illustrations and sidebars married to the main body of text? In conception and production, how did that happen?

Larsen: I knew there would be something different about the format ? I had a vague idea of a field guide in my head ? but I wrote the book almost all the way through without any illustrations. I was originally using footnotes for T.S.'s digressions. Footnotes have a long, tangled history in fiction. People use them for a lot of different reasons, but often I find them intrusive.

In writing, I found that in these annotations T.S. showed his weakness; he was most comfortable in the asides. He would make reveals that he wouldn't in the main text. I got almost all the way through the draft before I rea

[Editor's note: Meet Laila Lalami at Powell's City of Books on Tuesday, April 28 at 7:30 pm.]

People will be talking about Secret Son ? on college campuses, in book groups, online, in the US and abroad. Upon finishing the novel, I couldn't pin down what about it struck me as so distinctive. It took a second read to realize: Laila Lalami has written a timeless story that's, paradoxically, very much of our time.

When Lalami published Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits in 2005, the debut earned praise far and wide, from acclaimed literary authors such as Junot Díaz and even popular weeklies including People magazine. Four years later, the former Portland resident, a native of Morocco, has returned with a remarkable novel of contemporary Casablanca that's sure to expand her avid readership even further.

In a starred review, Library Journal calls Secret Son "a brilliant story of alienation and desperation that easily transports readers to hot, dusty Casablanca." American Book Award winner Joe Sacco agrees, declaring, "Laila Lalami's tale of a young Moroccan man who must navigate between a bleak background and a bright possibility is magnificently told and wrenched my heart."

÷ ÷ ÷

Dave: In Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, you immediately call attention to the proximity of Spain to Morocco, across the strait. Fourteen miles separate these characters from their dreams. Similarly, in Secret Son, a short bus ride takes Youssef from the high life in Casablanca to the slums of Hay An Najat. Were you conscious of that parallel as you were writing?

Laila Lalami: I never made the connection in the way that you put it. I was just writing things the way I saw them.

In Casablanca, in some ways, class differences are actually even more sharply contrasted than in Secret Son, so that it's impossible not to see the disparity between rich and poor. In describing Youssef's world, I was consciously taking note of the things that would stand out for him. I hadn't made the connection between the two books, but I guess it makes sense.

Dave: A movie comes to town every week, and Youssef sees them all. Movies are his window onto the rest of the world. Obviously, you grew up in very different circumstances, but when you were young in Morocco did movies play a similar role for you?

Lalami: Books and movies. I grew up in a family where everybody read, but we also watched a lot of movies. American movies, Egyptian movies, Indian movies... so all of that was very familiar to me.

In Morocco in the seventies, there was a thriving movie-going culture. But since the appearance of DVDs, so much pirating has been going on ? you can get a movie on DVD even before you can see it in a theater ? that a lot of theaters have gone out of business. Nowadays you have fewer theaters, in fewer neighborhoods. Having Youssef go to one of the still-remaining theaters was a good starting point for me.

Dave: Youssef often imagines himself as an actor, as if his life were a dramatization. Unfortunately, he doesn't realize who's directing or writing the screenplay.

Did the book end up resembling the vision of it that you had when you started?

Lalami: No. My initial idea was very different. When I started working on the book ? I think it was in 2003 ? I had this image of a young man going home in the rain to the shack that he shares with his mother, after seeing a movie. I was interested in the contrast between the perfect life that we have in movies, that stylized way of looking at life, and going home to reality. And I always thought his mother was hiding something; I didn't quite know what.

I thought that it would also be the story of his half-sister, who also appears in the book ? it was going to be an intergenerational story about these two families. Youssef and his half-sister would be the main characters, the two points-of-view.

But over the course of working on the book, my focus kept narrowing. I dropped the intergenerational storyline ? after a while, I guess I wasn't as interested in writing about the earlier generation. Eventually, I focused on the main character and his dilemmas, but from that process I had a lot more insights into who he was.

Dave: Secret Son is filled with secrets ? it's right there in the title. The characters construct stories to protect those secrets; and the stories take on lives of their own.

Lalami: We all like to think we have some sort of control over our lives, but of course so much is predetermined by the circumstances of our birth. I wanted to show how the external world affects what we think of our choices. Those choices are conditioned by our perceptions of the outside world, which isn't necessarily reality. I wanted to show the other perspectives, since I already had them, and show how those characters influence Youssef without his realizing it.

Dave: That's a common process. Often a fiction writer goes through the equivalent of a research phase, generating material that may not make it into the book but very much informs the story.

Lalami: Absolutely.

Dave: Not long after I first read Secret Son, over the winter, we spoke, and I fumbled to describe what I found distinctive about the book. I wound up saying, "You write like dead people." Fortunately, for some reason, you appreciated that.

Lalami: Let me tell you how I interpreted what you meant. I took it to mean that the concerns of this novel were the traditional concerns of, say, the nineteenth century novel. For example, the secret identity: this young man journeys to find his father and all of that.

At the same time, this book is rooted in the modern age. Youssef's concerns are very much of our time. So when you said "dead writers," I interpreted that to mean the journey of the character, finding his father, coming of age, class ? those are timeless concerns of the novel. I wasn't insulted. It was interesting. You're the only one who had said that.

Dave: There's a timelessness, right, despite the fact that the events are very much grounded in a particular contemporary time and place. I've found that what's best about Secret Son is hard to explain succinctly without oversimplifying.

Lalami: I'm

The Lost City of Z is 2009's first can't-miss nonfiction. New Yorker staff writer David Grann travels through the Amazon in the footsteps of explorer Percy Fawcett, who captured the world's imagination (and redefined the borders of South America) before disappearing in the jungle without a trace. Nathaniel Philbrick calls The Lost City "a riveting, totally absorbing real-life adventure story" — and early readers at Powell's couldn't agree more.

The course of the Yukon Quest International Dog Sled Race stretches 1,023 miles over frozen rivers and icy mountain passes, through spruce forests and meager backwoods outposts as Balzar writes, "wildlands settled only here and there, and even then barely settled at all." The author explained, "You see pictures of dog mushing, and they're really boring: starting lights and a crowd and some dogs lunging. That's pretty much our image of it. It's hardly the truth at all." An addictive concoction of history, risk, character, and local color, Yukon Alone has been hailed as "the best book on the Far North since Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams."

The author of such popular and provocative novels as The Mezzanine and The Fermata found himself thrust into the national spotlight when Kenneth Starr revealed that a famous former intern had given America's President a copy of Baker's 1992 erotic classic, Vox. With his most recent novel, The Everlasting Story of Nory, Baker continues to expand his literary turf, focusing his unique, digressive style on a precocious nine year old American girl.