An Interview with Min Jin Lee

Steve Williams: Free Food for Millionaires is one of the catchiest titles I’ve ever heard. Can you talk a little bit about how you decided on this as a title for your novel?

Min Jin Lee: Years before I started the book, a friend who worked on Wall Street told me a story about how at his bank, after a deal ends, there is usually a free buffet lunch for the deal team as well as others on the trading floor. Usually, the food was thematic to the deal — e.g., Indian food after raising capital for an Indian power plant.

My friend described that at these free lunches, there was one very wealthy managing director who would routinely rush to the head of the line to fill his plate before the more junior, and obviously, lesser paid employees. I thought this was hilarious that a really rich guy, i.e., a millionaire, would lunge for free food and push out the others. It seemed so tacky and ridiculous to me. I grew up in a fairly blue collar neighborhood, and I just remember that it was not cool to be so grubby even when you didn’t have much, and this anecdote made me think more about how poor(er) people and middle class people are often made to feel ashamed of their desires while very wealthy people often feel entitled to get what they want when they want it. I wanted to call the book Free Food for Millionaires because I wanted to write about socially thwarted desires as well as this contrasting idea that grace (unmerited favor) is available to all people.

SW: Free Food for Millionaires takes the form of the 19th century social novel. What appeals to you about this narrative style, and what did you feel made it suitable for your novel?

MJL: The 19th century social novel is my favorite genre so although it was enormously challenging for me, it made sense to try to write one. (“Heck, why not?” she thought.) When I was growing up, I found comfort in the very long European works. I think when the story is good, readers don’t want the books to end; however, today’s reader, assaulted by the immense volume of books to choose from and short on time, is suspicious of the long work, especially when the work’s quality or appeal can’t be verified. That said, I guess, I was faithful that someone else besides my family members may want to read a long book about people I found interesting. I am fascinated by communities, small and large, and individuals in them. I am curious about how we individuals work within communities and without them so it felt very natural to me to pursue this old-school style of writing which allowed for questions, observations and experiments. As a writer, I remain more interested in all the characters rather than one character. I confess that I don’t believe in “a man is an island” or that one man’s fate can be determined in a vacuum so I seek a well populated fiction. As much as I admire the first person voice (see Jane Eyre), I think my work would not have made sense unless it was done in a third person omniscient point of view.

SW: I would imagine one of the greatest challenges of writing about a community is trying to imagine and realize such a diverse cast of characters. Was there a certain character (or characters) that was particularly challenging to bring to life?

MJL: You are generous to say that envisioning and realizing a community is challenging. In fact, for me, it was freaking daunting. I’ve heard some of my favorite artists talk about the image they have in their heads about what their work is supposed to look like. In my image, my story had a lot of strong people and lot of conflicting desire. This picture was helpful for me to overcome the hurdle of the big cast challenges, because I knew I had a book length work. Having a large cast also gave me enormous encouragement and comfort when certain characters would not cooperate. There were characters who lit up the page or tickled me with humor, no different than when I see certain people in my life. This was exciting and lifesaving, because writing requires an unnatural solitude, and I was enduring the absence of society (when writing) through replicating my own society (my characters). As in life, there are people I don’t look forward to seeing, and in my work, there were characters I felt frightened by, or knew there would be danger or injury when they showed up. I had to ask myself why I was afraid or why I dreaded them. When I wanted to write their stories, I had to grant these characters some aspect of myself to relate to them differently. I gave a character my height, or an illness I had once had, my hair color, or an odd interest I used to have in baking muffins. When I did this, it helped me to see my characters differently. The person with whom I had significant problems was Charles, my choir director; so I gave him my sense of failure, my sense of feeling lost in a world that didn’t need my work, my feeling left out in a glittering and imagined New York art world where all the Greats know each other. I was going through a profound and protracted period of sadness during my years of writing my first book, and Charles, a very troubled character who is also gifted, embodied some of that emotion. As I write my current manuscript, I think I may always feel this shadow of melancholy; it feels permanent to me and not necessarily unfortunate. The people in my pages, good and bad, help me with this.

SW: I love the idea that certain characters frightened even you; it’s a testament to how alive the society you create feels. But I want to talk a little bit more about how you give some characters some of your own qualities and quirks. So when you give a character a certain trait of yours, it’s a way for you to begin making them identifiable for yourself? It’s a step towards understanding them?

MJL: Yes, I think when I gave the characters certain biographical traits, it made them identifiable and more understandable to me. If a person tells me that he is from the Bronx, for example, I tend to feel a sense of kinship with him (perhaps irrationally), because I spent four wonderful years in the Bronx attending the Bronx High School of Science. It’s possible that this Bronx native may in fact dislike nerds like me who went to Bronx Science but lived in Queens, but because I associate the Bronx with a place of growth and intellectual safety (really), I identify with him and transfer my positive feelings to him in some measure. I suppose this is why when we attend social events, we ask strangers, “Where are you from?” — it’s a wish to connect through a superficial question, because we want to transfer a personal association (good or bad) to a new person. I suppose it is also a method to infer alleged knowledge from one’s hometown.

SW: You bring up hometowns and kinship. Is the desire to create that bond with your characters a reason you chose to set your novel in New York City?

MJL: I wrote three other (failed) novel manuscripts before this Free Food for Millionaires, and FFfM was the first one set in the boroughs of Queens and Manhattan. I was inspired by A House For Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul, the English writer of Indian descent who was born and raised in Trinidad. Naipaul set his novel Mr. Biswas in “Arwacas” based on the town of Chaguanas (an hour south of the capital Port-of-Spain, Trinidad) where he grew up, and reading that work in particular gave me courage to write about Elmhurst, Queens where I grew up. Naipaul is a controversial figure, and I do not agree with much of his political sentiments, however, I am always amazed by the depth and honesty of his struggle as a writer. I wanted very much to write about this world that meant so much to me, and I think by the time I approached this manuscript, I was much less worried about judgment.

SW: How important do you think NYC is to your work? Or, to put it another way, do you think of yourself as a New York writer?

MJL: I feel most myself in New York City. I grew up in Queens, went to high school in the Bronx, and my parents had a wholesale business in Manhattan’s Koreatown on 30th Street and Broadway. I live in Manhattan now. I feel comfortable around the many different kinds of people in New York, and when I am in a monolithic culture, or a place that elevates homogeneity over heterogeneity, I feel stifled and upset. I think of myself as a New York writer even when I am not in New York, and by that I mean, I think the values and themes of New York — uniqueness, ambition, outsiders/insiders, failure, grandiosity and humiliation — are deeply ingrained in my point of view.

SW: Can you describe some of your habits and practices as a writer?

MJL: Before I write, I read the Bible and I pray. I read a long time ago that Willa Cather did this, and I tried it.

This ritual started out as a kind of curious exercise, and now, I can’t imagine not doing it anymore. It feels very private and quiet to me, and I think I need this before I write.

SW: You come from a law background, attending Georgetown Law and practicing as a lawyer for several years. In what ways do you feel that experience has benefited your writing? Conversely, do you feel there have been certain advantages to never going for an MFA? 

MJL: I think I have a great deal of discipline about work and effort. Many of my friends have MFAs, and they are wonderful writers. I have always wanted an MFA but didn’t have the time or the willingness to change my family life to pursue this. I love classes and studying so I think I would have enjoyed getting an MFA. That said, I don’t think I have any disadvantages from it. I can’t be sure, of course. I don’t know many fiction writers so perhaps this is what happened because I have a very layperson life. I live in a very ordinary way, and I prefer this.

SW: It’s clear that you’ve been influenced by George Eliot and other 19th century authors, but are there contemporary writers who influence your writing or are important to you as a reader? 

MJL: I adore Junot Dîaz‘s work. His work gave me a kind of permission to be honest about the world I loved. Junot Dîaz is a genius.

When I was in college, I read a lot of Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde; all three influenced me a great deal when I was starting to put words together.

SW: I’ve heard you and Junot Dîaz talk about writing with a specific audience in mind. From what I understand, the idea there isn’t to exclude anyone, but to give your work a purpose and a goal. To paraphrase something Dîaz said, ‘A comment directed towards someone specific is more interesting to overhear than a comment directed towards nobody.’ When your work reaches that target audience, what would you like him or her to get out of reading your work? 

MJL: I think I would like him or her to feel seen, because I feel like I want to really see everyone. I have felt unseen, and this is a kind of specific condition I have lived with. I think many people feel unseen or in contrast exposed, but few people feel seen for who they are. I think it takes time to see people, to really consider who they are. I hope to do this for my reader through my work.

An Interview with Gabriel Brownstein

Gabriel Brownstein and I conducted this interview by e-mail, using the addresses provided us by St. John’s University, where he is a professor and I was once a student. During my years as an English major and a grad student, I took a handful of fiction writing workshops with Professor Brownstein. His classes were immensely popular — four or five of my peers and I comprised a cohort who registered for any class with Professor Brownstein’s name attached to it. During workshop, we’d write down the names of authors and books he gushed about; we’d jot down writing adage after writing adage, some of them his own (“What happens next in your story? The worst thing possible.”), some of them borrowed from others (Flannery O’Connor: “Dramatize, don’t report.”).

But class was not enough for me. I would visit his office hours regularly. We talked about my work, we talked about what we were reading, the steam from his Lipton tea drifting between us. And I would leave his office trying to decide which I would do first when I got home: read or write.

After conducting this interview with Gabe — which felt a lot like a written version of the sort of conversation we used to have in his office — it was easy to see what I’ve always found so inspiring about him, which is that while he is professorial in his depth and breadth of knowledge, he is also amateurish in his giddy enthusiasm. When he talks about anything literary, the subtext is always: I just love this stuff, don’t you?

*

STEVE WILLIAMS: Maybe you could start by talking a little bit about the new book.

GABRIEL BROWNSTEIN: There’s not really a new book. There are new stories, and they’re coming out here and there in quarterlies. I’m not sure where they’re going, collectively, but they’re going somewhere. I think.

SW: Your first novel, The Man from Beyond, tells the story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini’s Spiritualism debate from the perspective of reporter Molly Goodman. In one of your more recent stories, “Occupations, Settlements, Territories” — which was published in the Spring 2010 issue of the Harvard Review — the young, male narrator works at a socialist Zionist summer camp and converses with the spirit of his father. What about the subject matter of spirits interests you?

GB: I once read an interview with Robert Stone, where the interviewer asked why his characters drank so much and did so many drugs and he said something like, “I don’t know, but they keep doing it.”

I think that everything I’ve published has something to do with ghosts, something to do with haunting. And I like books with ghosts in them. I think ghosts work in stories when they make the ineffable into something dramatic and ironic and maybe even comical. But there’s a limit to this: as soon as you make the ineffable a ghost it becomes, in terms of the story, pretty effable. So it’s a ham-handed move in a way. But it’s my move.

SW: What, for you, are the differences between novel writing and story writing? What different challenges and pleasures does each form offer, and is it always a conscious decision to write one and not the other?

GB: I’m finding that right now stories suit me temperamentally, and I’m not sure why. I feel a little looser in the short form, a little more at ease. I don’t think I can imagine myself ever going 500 pages for a novel, I’m not that kind of guy. At the same time, there’s pressure in story writing — stories demand a kind of perfection. As they say, a novel with a flaw can be a great novel, but a flawed short story is a dud.

SW: It seems fair to say, though, that our literary culture favors and even has more respect for the novel form. Just to give one example of this, a quick Google search reveals that since 2000, only two story collections have won the Pulitzer, and none have won the National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award. Which brings us back to the old question: is the short story dying?

GB: My favorite book of 2010, the one where I discovered a writer who blew me away, was Memory Wall, by Anthony Doerr, a knock-out of a short story collection. There were two collections this year by favorite writers of short stories, Jim Shepard and Steven Millhauser, plus the National Book Award-nominated collected stories of Edith Pearlman, a short story writer who, I’m embarrassed to say, I had never heard of until this year. None of these books, I believe, were listed in the NY Times Best Books of the year.

So is the story dying? No. Is it undervalued? Oh, yeah.

It’s tough to argue that contemporary novelists are more serious artists than story writers, or more successful artistically. What is true is that the markets for short stories are vanishing, fast. The Atlantic has (I think) moved its story publishing on-line. Even the Paris Review has, over the last decade, geared itself a little more towards non-fiction. It’s just about impossible for a writer to get a collection of stories published by a mainstream press, without promising said press a novel. There are lots of good new story quarterlies, but these don’t get much attention.

Funny thing: The last three stories I published, all in very high class quarterlies, did not have on-line presence (the magazines did, but not the stories), which means in certain ways that for most readers the stories did not exist. I have a feeling e-reading may change the relationship of short stories and readers. A short story seems a very natural thing, to me, to download on an e-reader. More so than a big fat novel. But maybe I’m dreaming.

SW: I’d like to open up my last question about the state of the story to the state of American fiction in general. Alexander Nazaryan recently wrote a piece for Salon in which he suggested that the reason an American hasn’t won the Nobel Prize since Morrison in 1993 is that America’s great writers exist in “self-enforced isolation” from the rest of the world — their work is too insular.

The writers many Americans see as deserving of the nod — Roth, Oates, DeLillo, McCarthy — are all, according to Nazaryan, what David Foster Wallace once called Great Male Narcissists (even Oates). And things are not getting better: many of the great writers of this generation, he says — naming Franzen, Foer, Tan, and Lahiri — are guilty of the same insularity.

In what direction do you see American fiction going, and is this a direction you’re pleased with?

GB: I haven’t read the article, so I can’t respond to its particulars. But there are real problems with translations coming into America. Go into any good bookstore and ask for new books of European stories in translation — books from anywhere but the US — and outside of the classics, you’ll be lucky to get three. It’s true that other nations read American books, and US readers don’t read much in translation. It isn’t a good thing.

I have a hard time, though, with the suggestion that American writers are more insular than they were sixty or seventy years ago. It seems just basically true that more US writers come from more places and backgrounds than they used to. You mention Lahiri and Morrison, I’d add Junot Diaz, Edward P. Jones, and without even going further note that these are all writers with huge historical and political concerns. And the force of multiculturalism has been a good thing for writers who are as you say, Great Male Narcissists.

Operation Shylock, my favorite book by my favorite living writer, is supersonically engaged with the issues of Zionism, history, identity, imperialism, racism, antisemitism, and (yes) narcissism. I mean, it’s not like men’s tennis: American writers are not getting beaten by European writers.

The Nobel is a lousy measure. If the Swedes had gotten to vote on the number one player of my youth, they would have always picked Borg over McEnroe. On the other hand, when you get to the most celebrated youngish novelists right now, there is this strange phenomenon of the massive novel about a few friends from college — Freedom, The Emperor’s Children, The Marriage Plot — and without dissing any of those writers or books — I am a big, big Jeffrey Eugenides fan — it’s just notable that the characters are quite likely to have gone to the same kinds of schools as the reviewers and editors and publicists hyping the books.

I’m not saying there’s no insularity going on in the world of US marketing and publishing. But the Nobel — or any prize — seems a lousy way to gauge the work of writers. I’d give the same answer about US novelists as I did a while back about US story writers. Every year, there are more good writers writing more good books than I can find time to read.

SW: That leads nicely into my next question, which is about an article you wrote for The Millions called “The Big Show: Franzen, Goodman, and the Great American Novel.” In the article, you explore why Franzen’s Freedom gets dubbed The Great American Novel and Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector does not. You examine — among other things — how this difference in reception is related to the formal differences between these works, and one of the comments you make about Freedom is that it “sometimes feels like a guy at a dinner party who’s talking very, very loudly.”

How and to what extent does a novel “talking very, very loudly” relate to that novel being narcissistic and/or insular? Because in your answer to the last question, you sort of set up a dichotomy: writers with political and historical ambitions, and writers who write about old friends from school. I’m not saying these are rigid or mutually exclusive categories, but I am wondering to what extent you think Freedom being insular (although it does have political ambitions) relates to it being so loud.

GB: Look, Franzen is a great writer. Freedom is (to my mind) his second best book so far. But it’s really, really good. And sweeping, and large. And though sometimes his sympathies can seem pinched, in the end he reveals himself as a big-hearted writer. Reading it side by side with The Cookbook Collector — another really good book that is really similar in form and theme — I began to wonder, why all the attention for one book and not the other?

The disparity seemed extreme given the quality of the books. So I stumbled to my answer to that question as best I could. One thing I noticed is that Goodman is, as she said in a response to my article on the excellently named website Bookslut, interested in invisibilty. (I’m not quoting her exactly.) Franzen, to put it mildly, does not seem so interested in invisibility. He’s interested in showing off — not a bad thing in a novelist. (It’s a thing you could say too about James Joyce. Big show off.)

I don’t think Franzen is at all an insular novelist. People love to take swipes at “American fiction” and usually when they do they take a swipe at Jonathan Franzen — I saw a panel where a British novelist of Pakistani extraction kept talking about the failure of the American 9/11 novel—she had written a 9/11 novel too. And privately, I thought: really? You’re going to say that all the writers in the US are all writing badly about 9/11 and that poor writing is because they’re American?

There’s such a diversity of writers in this country, such a diversity of outlooks among them. I think writers do what they can. And I think sometimes writers who seem “insular” are, on close inspection, working at very intricate complicated powerful stuff. It’s an easy way to dismiss writers, and it’s a charge that gets leveled mostly at domestic, female novelists. Who’s more insular than Jane Austen? Who’s a better novelist?

I do not think that the Big Subject results in a Good Novel, and a lot of my favorite readings can seem small and domestic at first blush. What I was saying about the bunch-of-friends-from-school novel wasn’t intended as a dig at the novelists — I think theirs is a real way of describing current middle class existence in this country. The insularity might be more in the marketing and the publishing world.

But I’ll make a stab at a big idea here: writers are insular. They sit at the island of their desks, alone. Many of my favorite books are about that kind of insularity. Borges? Bernhard? Are they “insular”?  They write a lot about being stuck in their own heads.

SW: You teach in a department that features M.A. and D.A. degree programs, but no M.F.A. program. Yet your fiction writing courses are consistently filled with students used to writing critically who are eager to try their hand at — for lack of a better term — creative writing. What’s your understanding of the relationship between creative writing and literary criticism? Does the study of one enhance the study of the other?

GB: I like to quote the poet William Matthews, “Poetry is not criticism backwards.” But literary criticism and creative writing classes intersect around an easy point, which is reading. I think in both kinds of classes, if they’re taught well at the undergraduate level, the teacher’s not trying to turn to room into a bunch of critics or a bunch of poets — but getting people to put their attention on language, and on literary language.

I do wonder, at the doctoral level, what a student gets out of my class — I can’t imagine that writing a short story in any way helps them pragmatically with their dissertations or their contemplations of Derrida. But maybe it allows them in the face of literature to be completely amateurish, which, if you ask me, is the best way to approach a good book, out of love and not professionalism.

In that way, I particularly like my students. I like that it’s not my job, as it would be in an MFA program, to kind of move them toward getting an agent, toward thinking about publication. I don’t have to pretend that my class is much more than an intellectual play pen.

SW: Could you talk a little bit about your process and your habits as a writer?

GB: Two or three good hours every day without interruption is the idea in weeks when I have lots of time. When I don’t have time, I try to fill all the time I can get. Which can mean a six hour writing day and then a half-hour writing day. I write the same thing over and over and over again for a really long time. I go back and forth from draft to draft between computer and long hand. I usually have more than one project cooking at once. I wish all the time that I were better.

SW: You mention that you write longhand. What about writing longhand appeals to you?

GB: It’s just my habit, I guess. I mean, I can give justifications: mostly that I go more slowly writing than I do typing, and so my brain is always a little ahead of my hand when I write long-hand, and so the length of my attention is stretched a bit.

Also, I don’t have the distractions of the computer when I write in a notebook — I don’t go back and polish my sentences as I write them. But I think what helps me most is going back and forth from the notebook to computer to the printed page, to the notebook, and so on. I see the work a little bit differently each time.

I used to suggest that students write longhand, but my guess is that it’s very foreign to lots of people these days. I do find, for me at least, that writing only at the computer tends to make me focus on tiny perfectionist details of words and sentences in a way that’s not always good.

SW: What have you been reading lately? Are there certain works or authors that you find yourself rereading, works you return to for some type of guidance in your own writing?

GB: My reading of fiction the last few months has been all over the place. The stand-out recent literary work has got to have been Denis Johnson’s novella, Train Dreams, just a beautiful book by one of the great living US writers. I reviewed it, which gave me the opportunity to reread a lot of Johnson. Fiskadoro and Jesus’ Son are both astounding works.

I also recently read the Fire and Ice books, George R.R. Martin, which I just could not stop reading. I went through all five books in a row. And — since I can — I’ll just put in my two cents about those: Everyone is comparing him to Tolkein, but I think the more appropriate, immediate influences on him are probably Roger Zelazny and Michael Moorcock — favorite writers of my teen years.

Who do I go back to most often? I’m a big re-reader. Over the summer, I reread a lot of stuff from my childhood — Salinger and Le Guin and Hammett. And, yes, I recently reread Anna Karenina, but every writer says that, right?