A Decorous Way to Explode: An Interview with Avner Landes, author of Meiselman: The Lean Years

Control

Stuart: Martin Amis has this great line about early Roth, that he was “always looking for a decorous way to explode.” I don’t necessarily sense this in your meticulous writing but I do sense it in Meiselman himself. At one point he says, “Jews don’t believe in controlling emotions. Jews believe in controlling actions.” Meiselman might know this intellectually, even theologically, but it doesn’t always work out for him in that way. The novel deftly introduces this idea early on when you write: “After thirty-six years, Meiselman had reached a limit, a breaking point.”

Avner: Yes. Meiselman thinks the “breaking point” is that he’s done taking everyone’s abuse. In reality, the breaking point is that he’s done sublimating his emotions. Of course, this isn’t something someone simply decides to do, and, in Meiselman’s case, it swings too far the other way, where he suddenly can’t control his emotions or his actions. Most of us wrestle with this question of how do we know when to act on our emotions. We have to learn to hear what the world—people, situations—is telling us. It comes down to self-awareness, but even the most self-aware person will get it wrong some—or most—of the time, but we hope that awareness of getting it wrong will lead to a better outcome the next time. As the story progresses, Meiselman loses any ability to control his actions. Can he reverse this before the story comes to a close?

Fatalism

Stuart: There are so many strong observations in the novel about what I would call Meiselman’s fatalism; he’s doomed, he deserves it. When he has car trouble he thinks, “Meiselman would never pull over for Meiselman.” You counter this with a comical strain of American self-improvement: he’s reading Lee Iacocca and Sam Walton and Ray Kroc, he’s wondering what Colin Powell would do. Meiselman wants to change his luck, even though he thinks his “luck breaks even.” This is such a rich source of return throughout the novel. And in many ways it works for him. Toward the close of the book, he is playing to win. Where do you locate the origins of this, and how did you think about luck and self-improvement when writing the book?

Avner: Early on, when I thought about the book’s shape, I used Bruce Jay Friedman’s Stern as a model. In the beginning of that book, Stern’s wife suffers an assault and humiliation at the hands of a neighbor, although we’re never fully sure what happened. Stern determines that he will eventually have to confront the neighbor and defend his wife’s “honor.” I was taken with this idea of Meiselman identifying a possible moment of redemption or liberation, which he does right after suffering his own humiliations at the story’s outset. When writing the book, I believed that this was a make-or-break week for Meiselman. Everything would change or he’d be doomed to a life of repeating the miserable patterns that had defined his lean years up until this point. But when I finished writing the book, it occurred to me that maybe this isn’t a unique week, a moment when the light bulb went off. Maybe this too is a pattern, where Meiselman identifies an upcoming moment that will act as a test, a moment when he can take an unexpected action and change his luck. Meiselman says at one point, “Every day, every waking moment, we torpedo potential paths to redemption…” Maybe for Meiselman every week is a week like this one.

Jewish writers

Stuart: Meiselman is an orthodox Jew from suburban Chicago who works in a library, so let’s start crankily with what it means to be a Jewish writer. I’m thinking of recent takes on this question by critics like Adam Kirsch and Joshua Cohen, who generally conclude that it’s the non-Jewish lions – Updike and Franzen come to mind – who long to play the Jew, while writers like Roth and Bellow wanted only to be Americans. What does identifying as a Jewish writer mean to you? What does it mean to write a ‘capital J’ Jewish book; Meiselman is not a Jew because he likes pickles and Crossing Delancey — he’s a believer. What are your hopes in publishing such a Jewish book, an American book?

Avner: Roth, Bellow, and Malamud definitely influenced my writing early on, but I took the wrong lessons from them when it came to the question of being a Jewish writer. I appreciated that they wrote stories that were heavy with Jewish content and populated with Jews because this was their world. Even if one can argue that Roth, especially, does end up saying a lot about Jews and the Jewish experience in America —you and I have been discussing The Counterlife, to pick one huge example —it would be presumptuous to assume that this was his goal. Well, I made this assumption when I started writing. And I strived to do similar things with my own work. I wrote a story called "My Trip to Poland," about a formerly religious guy who goes on a JCC heritage trip to Poland with a bunch of retirees. He ends up getting drunk every night in the hotel bar with one of the Polish hotel workers, and too hungover to ever join the group for the tour of Auschwitz. Is that funny? Hell, yeah. But the story bothered me as I developed as a writer, because it had nothing to say about people and why they do what they do. The humor felt cheap and obvious. To paraphrase something David Bezmozgis once said, irreverence implies that something is revered, his point being, I guess, that irreverence isn't something a nihilist can pull off, and if we can't access a character's soul then it's tough to know what he or she reveres. Eventually, I grew as a writer and became more interested in the characters themselves, as opposed to using them as vehicles to deliver a message, Jewish or otherwise. Readers can feel free to identify me as such but they shouldn't expect any grand or guiding statements. I don't speak for Jews. I don't even speak for me when I write. I speak for the characters I'm writing.

Fertility

Stuart: Meiselman and Deena’s fertility struggles are a source of humor and pathos throughout the novel. This made for some colorful passages. “Deena ate mandrakes, drank willow water blessed by an Israeli seer, recited Psalm 145 daily, and visited the graves of rabbis. Deena’s barrenness, though, could not be cured, and frustration ended this routine.” Talk about what this plot line meant to you and what you were trying to accomplish.

Avner: It came from my reluctance to give Meiselman and Deena a kid. At the time I started writing the book, I didn’t have a child and wasn’t confident I could pull it off. But here was an Orthodox couple that had been married for four years, and, in that world, fertility issues are one of the only reasons why a couple like that wouldn’t have a child. In the end, this plot line did a lot of work of manifesting Meiselman’s delusions, starting with his blaming their difficulty conceiving on “Deena’s barrenness,” when it is his own sperm count issue that is the problem. Then there is his reluctance to consider adoption, his belief that genes are all that matter, and not because he believes in nature over nurture, but because he assumes adoption will paint him as a sterile, and, therefore, unmanly man. But the real question I hope readers will ask is, “Is Meiselman prepared in any way to parent a child?” On some deeper level, is this why he can’t impregnate his wife? The thought does eventually occur to him. 

Food

Stuart: When Meiselman acts out, it is often through eating. I would say he has a borderline eating disorder in these, his lean years. How did you think about using food (and candy) in the novel?

Avner: Meiselman eats the same bowl of oatmeal at breakfast every morning and the same peanut butter and jelly sandwich, bag of chips, and apple juice box for lunch. Every Friday night, Meiselman and his wife eat dinner at his parents. Mealtimes in Meiselman’s life, in other words, are ritualized, providing him with the order he strives for in every other area of his life. How else will he keep his impulses at bay? He has even come to expect certain types of conversations at each meal. Breakfast is lighthearted, he and his wife sharing news stories from the papers. Sunday lunch is for serious matters. As his wife, Deena, remarks at one point, “It’s fun watching you with your parents at Shabbat dinner. Everyone giving rundowns of their week.” In Deena’s mind, mealtimes are about connecting. In the book, however, mealtime usually ends up exposing the frayed lines of communication between the people sitting at the table. Because food can only occupy people for five, ten minutes. Then they are full. Then they need to do something with their traps, which usually results in talking and saying the wrong things. At one point Meiselman comes across the name of the actress Christina Ricci and we get the line, “Meiselman rented one of the actress’s movies thinking it was about football. Turned out it was about a miserable family sitting around a dining room table spewing bottled up grievances at one another.” This is a more accurate description of how mealtimes unfold in the novel. The movie is Buffalo ’66.

Our entire discussion could have been about food in the novel! But I’ll just add something about candy, or, more specifically, non-kosher food in the novel. When you grow up Jewish Orthodox, you are surrounded by people from your community and you have little awareness that most of the world doesn’t share your lifestyle. Food plays an outsized role in those moments when you make contact with the “outside world” and its divergence from how you live; ballgame hotdogs; commercials for candy; the bar and bat mitzvahs of cousins who don’t keep the laws of kosher. Through a child’s eyes, food, more than anything else, becomes the symbol for how the other half lives. So, yes, he acts out and briefly breaks free from his confinement through eating. But these forbidden foods he eats are also about his appetite for exploring new tastes. Change isn’t easy for any of us, and it usually does look juvenile.

Therapy

Stuart: I really enjoyed the resistance and acceptance of therapy in the novel. I'm curious how you see therapy functioning in Meiselman’s Orthodox community? You write that he doesn’t like people who think of God as your pal. Is a therapist your pal?

Avner: This book is a subtle love letter to therapy. Sure it engages in all of the stereotypes about therapy but only because they are all true and funny. Meiselman, we can all agree, is a prime candidate for therapy, the three-days-a-week variety. We learn he went in his twenties for a year, but, for an inexplicable reason, his mother took him out of therapy. From Meiselman’s memories of his time with Dr. Lin, we detect regret over his not having had more time with the doctor. It was having some type of impact on him, however small. Later, when it’s decided that he’ll return to therapy after an eight years absence, we sense his excitement but also his anxiety. He knows it’s what he needs to finally let go of certain things. But who will he be once he lets go of those things?

Now to answer your question about whether a therapist is a pal: It takes years and years of therapy to understand that the answer is no, a therapist isn’t a pal because what friend would put up with so much complaining; a therapist is a therapist.

Losers

Stuart: The Capitol Riots have gotten me thinking a lot about the history of losers. I read this provocative idea about losers recently, in an essay about how the Hebrew bible could be historical fiction to soothe a nation that lost. I was reading your novel at the same time and I couldn’t help seeing this “history of the loser” in Meiselman. I’m curious what you think about this idea in relation to Meiselman: “History may in the short term be made by the victors, but historical wisdom is in the long run enriched more by the vanquished  . . . Being defeated appears to be an inexhaustible well- spring of intellectual progress.”

Avner: “Soothe a nation that lost” seems to indicate a sugar-coating of history, which wouldn’t be enriching but impoverishing. But maybe a people, or a person, need both things along the way. We first need to feed ourselves a soothing explanation, something to get our breathing under control. Then, one day, we’re ready to confront what happened and deal with the cold, hard truth of it. That’s how I see Meiselman’s processing the history of his loserdom. So many books treat traumas as if their interpretations are clear-cut to the victims and readers. That they unlock a deeper mystery, explain motivations. (I want to be clear that I’m not talking about violent, severe traumas. We’re talking garden-variety traumas.) I’ve tried to treat the interpretation of the traumas in Meiselman’s past as something ongoing. At age forty, we’ll look at something from our childhood in a much different way than when we were twenty. We’ve identified other patterns. We’ve learned more about our own tendencies and the tendencies of others. Or maybe we’re not more enlightened and we’ve sunk even deeper into our own delusions.  

Subtitles

Stuart: Finally, the full title of the novel is Meiselman: The Lean Years. What made you decide on a subtitle? Was the book ever just called Meiselman?

Avner: There was a point late in the game when I considered dropping one of the titles, but my publisher, Jerry Brennan, urged me to keep both of them, and I’m glad I took his advice. The subtitle? I always thought calling a 420-page doorstopper The Lean Years was a solid joke, one that was even funnier when it was 550 pages. I also like the idea that we can look at this one week in Meiselman’s life and know that all of his years until this point have been lean. It does prompt the question whether fat years are on the horizon for poor Meiselman, a thought Meiselman has at one point in the book, although he can’t recall the biblical story and is unsure of what precedes what. But the book takes place in 2004, and Meiselman’s beloved, long-suffering White Sox haven’t won the World Series in 86 years, a streak that will end the next season. Why the Meiselman part of the title? Because this is not a parable. I want to make clear to the reader from the get-go that no matter what you may think of him, I’m here writing this book, standing up for him, when nobody else in the world will.