An Interview with Lydia Millet

I met Lydia Millet in 2009, in a writing workshop at the University of Alabama. I remember grabbing a beer and talking about graphic novels and Friday Night Lights at our local pub, about having children and a job and still finding time to write, and about how nice it was to get away for a weekend. I didn’t even know she liked animals — until I picked up the first book of a trilogy she’s currently working on. 

Lydia Millet is the author of many novels as well as a story collection called Love in Infant Monkeys (2009), which was one of three fiction finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. 2011 saw the publication by W.W. Norton of a novel called Ghost Lights, named a New York Times Notable Book, as well as Millet’s first book for middle readers, called The Fires Beneath the Sea. Millet works as an editor and writer at a nonprofit in Tucson, Arizona, where she lives with her two small children.

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Megan Paonessa: First off, how do you like being compared to Kurt Vonnegut on the cover of How the Dead Dream? I like Vonnegut, don’t get me wrong (he’s a Hoosier!), but that sort of blurb obviously colors expectations — and one can’t help but judge a book by its cover.

Lydia Millet: I’m always a bit perplexed by that comparison, owing to the fact that I haven’t read Vonnegut since my teens. Clearly I need some reeducation. In general though, comparisons to other writers are simultaneously flattering and insulting. I don’t know why it’s so necessary to go the Hollywood pitch route to describe literary books. “It’s Writer Brand X crossed with Writer Brand Y.” If I’m doing my job it’s not X crossed with Y at all.

MP: How do you feel about stereotypes? The IRS man. The real estate man. The office affair. The gay Air Force man. The breast-obsessed business types. These are all stereotypical character traits found in your novels, but as I found myself identifying them, I still thought these characters were uniquely interesting.

LM: I love stereotypes — types in general. I’m guessing that’s pretty clear. They are fascinating. Hey, stereotypes don’t kill people. Bad writing kills people.

MP: True! I guess what I’m trying to ask is, do you use stereotypes in order to say something . . . broader (?) . . . about life, the world, people? You mentioned in an interview with Willow Springs that one of the things you react against is the preoccupation with the personal in contemporary literary fiction.  

LM: Well stereotypes are mostly just obvious objectifications of people, right? Partly I want to objectify fictional people because it’s funny; partly I want to objectify them because I like to play with distance — the distance between the reader and the characters, the narrator and the characters, the author and the characters.

MP: Many of your reviewers describe your writing as deeply satirical. How important to you is the insertion of a political / ecological / moral / social stance?

LM: All this talk of insertion! It sounds rude. I don’t think of inserting things.

Not all my writing has a satirical tone. The trilogy of novels doesn’t, for example. But I can never leave the comic aside for too long.

MP: What do you mean by the comic?

LM: The comedic. I always end up returning to what’s funny to me, whether it’s marginal in a book or central. So while I don’t know that my most recently published books are particularly satirical, I do have a book I’m working on that’s more so, if only because I need to get away from the heavy sometimes.

MP: Writing drama carries the hazard of falling into melodrama — as Hal points out at the end of Ghost Lights. From what I’ve read about your work, Hal’s sort of soul pouring wasn’t always common in your characters. Was this trait specific to Hal, or has your writing been influenced in a new direction?

LM: Well, I don’t know that it’s not common — I’ve always been a sucker for internal monologue and so I think there’s a fair amount of soul pouring throughout my books. Ghost Lights is less a new direction than How the Dead Dream was.

MP: Do you think there’s a move in contemporary literary fiction to steer clear of emotional narratives? 

LM: I think the pretense that writing without emotion can exist is funny. You don’t want to go the direction of maudlin, you don’t want to overwrite, but underwriting emotion is a bore too, finally — safe and easy.

MP: So there has to be a balance.

LM: I wouldn’t say balance. Balance implies equilibrium, and I’m not sure how helpful that is in fiction. But I’d say emotion and cerebration are both important and compelling, and either without the other is a bit dull to me.

MP: Lastly, can you give us a glimpse into the last book of the trilogy? Perhaps (!!) which character’s point of view the narration will come through?

LM: My pleasure! The last book will come out next fall from Norton, it’s called Magnificence, and it’s written from the perspective of Susan, Hal’s wife. She inherits a house full of taxidermy in Pasadena.

MP: Taxidermy? Fantastic. I wonder how T. will react to that. I can’t wait to read it! Thanks, Lydia.

Caution! Do not read Galerie de Difformité (or this recommendation) straight through from start to finish!

[1] I was selling books at the Chicago Book Expo for &Now Books, when a woman walked up to our modest booth and picked up Galerie de Difformité I gave her the usual spiel, “This is our newest book, and it’s actually my favorite. It’s pretty unusual, I guess postmodern.” Her eyes grew wide when she cracked the book open. “The author actually encourages you to not read the book straight through.” She proceeded to shudder, throw down the book, and exclaim, “I can’t do it! I can’t do it!” So, okay, Galerieis not for everyone, at least not for those who aren’t willing to tease the boundaries of traditional writing.

[2] You are here. Go back and read section [1] or stop reading this recommendation. Or, if you must, go to section [4].

[3] By the way, Galerie is dedicated to you. Yeah, you. Seriously. It’d be common courtesy to at least buy a copy. Now go to section [8].

[4] If you like pictures in your book, you’ll like Galerie. If you like destroying / deforming / improving the printed word, you’ll love Galerie.

[5] When I was little, I read choose-your-own-adventure stories. The first time, I would read it like the book dictated, out of order, following a pseudo-self-guided path. Then, when I was not satisfied with the path I chose, I read the whole book cover to cover. A slew of stories were hiding in that book somewhere, and I needed to find them. This is how I read Galerie de Difformité. I still feel like I haven’t found all its hidden treasures.

[6] Read Galerie if you don’t know who you are. Read Galerie if you’ve ever wondered what it means to be beautiful.

[7] Read section [3], even though I know you already did because tradition compels you to read a book (or recommendation) straight through. But really, didn’t you read the title?

[8] When I visited Florence, I decided not to visit Dante’s house. (1. I never really liked Dante. 2. They were charging 10 Euros to get in). I probably would have visited Beatrice’s house if Florence had assigned one to her like Verona had for Juliette. Beatrice is a mysterious woman. She existed, yes, but where do the lines blur between historical truth and literary hyperbole? Galerie is narrated by Beatrice. Well, a deformed version of this elusive Florentine. I’m thankful the book is not narrated by Dante.

[9] Go here and deform an exhibit in the Galerie.

[10] Galerie is an adventure, so if you’re looking for an easy read to kick back with after a long day’s work, don’t read Galerie. Save it for when you’re ready to think.

On Peter Markus’s Bob, or Man on Boat

I’m usually late getting to books, because I have this dramatic assumption that books are responsible for finding you. I might have stolen this idea from the Lester Bangs of Almost Famous rather than the Lester Bangs who I used to want to be. I didn’t like Almost Famous but at the time it came out I wrote music reviews and interviewed bands for the now defunct Salt for Slugs, and I would read old reviews by Bangs and Hunter Thompson, in the hopes that, I don’t know, I could grow up to be somebody.

Yesterday I read Peter Markus’ Bob, or Man on Boat. It’s as thin as the skin of a blister, and as warm as cigarette’s cherry. It’s a fish tale. Moby Dick is referenced — “Call me Bob” — there’s a fish who should be caught. There are relationships that pulse and jangle, bob as though on the water.

I’ve never read the word Bob so many times, and not got offended. It’s a peaceful name to me now.

There’s a scene in Great Expectations where Pip discovers Joe can’t read. That, while Joe often sits by the fire with a book, he is merely finding the letters of his own name. If there is a Bob out there, with a similar condition, this book is assuredly for him.

But there is a greater quality to this work than this. A repetition fantastic. A rose is a rose is a rose. A fish is a fish is a fish.

Markus’ story telling is elegantly out of focus. The aperture of his imagination is wide. The characters in the scene are seen, but all else on the perimeter is blur. This is unique for a story that takes place outside.

The river is a river. It’s not a ribbon of wet green slung between to hills as though a length of rope dangling from the branches of a tree.

The fish is a fish. It is not a shiny fleck of flesh beneath the surface of the choppy water, smiling mildly with the flash of sun.

Or some shit.

There is an agenda: to catch a fish.

There is a complication beyond that: families buckle beneath the strain of addiction to river.

After that, there are lovely muted hues. Blues and greens, yet somehow piquant with emotion.

The story stretches on beyond the 133 pages. The conclusion is in absentia.

What is it then?

A fish tale, where the fish is not gutted.

A story about two men on one river hunting to find a thing they know they’d only throw back.

So what are the 133 pages: a fish on a boat, naked in the absence of water, its gills fumbling for something to breathe, its eyes wild with fear.

But nothing is greater than almost dying. And while Markus might not produce a carcass with this thin novel — or a trophy well mounted — he allows us to catch and release the moments in our own way. He gives us a story to hold.

I Don’t Know How to Describe the Book: Tim Kinsella's The Karaoke Singer's Guide to Self-Defense

“‘I hate The DaVinci Code and its stupid exclamatory big-string swells every thousand words.’

He nodded.

She repeated herself, ‘Yeah.'”

I have had an on and off again fascination with Tim Kinsella for years. I think of him as a sort of indie-rock Werner Herzog, and that might be totally off base, but that is sort of what I think of him as. First as the singer of Cap’n Jazz and then in Joan of Arc he delighted and annoyed me with a great songs that held in them the potential to be be unsatisfying and annoying. They (I’m talking more about Joan of Arc than Cap’n Jazz) also had something literary about them and like the other notable Cap’n Jazz spin-off, Promise Ring, the lyrics had something ee cummings-esque about them. Here are two of my favorite Joan of Arc songs, feel free to listen to either of them as a soundtrack to the rest of this review.

“I Love a Woman (Who Loves Me)”

“Post-Coitus Rock”

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this might just be one of the best novels of the year. I probably haven’t read the other novels that could be up for this honor, and this is a pretty flawed best novel of the year, but I think it’s still that good and, even with the problems I’ll mention later, it manages to transcend those flaws to be a very satisfying novel.

First, the book looks amazing. Aesthetically, featherproof has put out another fine looking book. Possibly their best yet. It’s mass-market size (but comfortable mass market size (were there people out there really complaining about mass markets being too uncomfortable? (this little aside has nothing to do with this book but with a way big publishers tried to market the new size books a few years ago))), but with trade paper-back quality, and even a kind of pretentious detail of the price of the novel written on the upper-right hand corner of the first page in a way that makes it look like it had been written with a pencil. You know like an used or independent bookstore might do. It was a little detail I loved when I first saw it and showed to Karen multiple times, each time thinking it was something new I was sharing with her. Oops.

Second, there is no description anywhere on the book about what to expect. Just the kind of catchy title and a blurb from Dennis Cooper. This scared me a little bit. I generally find that books Dennis Cooper blurbs turn out to be ‘shocking’ in a way that bores me the same way that looking at teenage goth kids in their scary get-ups bore me. Fortunately this book isn’t shocking and doesn’t try to be.

Third? I don’t know how to describe the book. I want to thrust it in to peoples’ hands and tell them to read it, but I’m afraid that if I gush over it the book won’t live up to expectations. I was expecting a fairly pretentious book that would humor me in the balls-out way it danced around pretensions. This is a novel for gosh-sakes by a guy who for one of his albums filled the CD booklet with a photo montage of him(?) and his hip looking friends dressed up from scenes of Godard’s Weekend. I was expecting the literary equivalent of that. Nope. It didn’t turn out to be that either.

I’ve been putting off writing this review for a while now. I don’t know how to gush appropriately. Things I think of saying could come off wrong.

I’ll put off gushing for another paragraph and say what is bad about the book. The book is over-written at times. It can be wordy in the way a good editor might have been able to control a bit. It also gets a little, um, well-wordy in an intellectual sense at times to, for example a seventeen year-old (I think that is her age, she’s in high school still) can have this scene:

“Still, it had been a while since it first occurred to Sarah Ann that her MySpace profile no longer reflected the her she thought herself to be. Social networking was obviously little more than the sunny cultural inversion of terror cells, the final clinging to some sense of community or belonging that the last stages of consumer Capitalism would allow. and the habit had been knocked to the back of her mind, so only occasionally did she cringe, recalling the state of her identity as she left if projected to the world. But, she did cringe.”

and later in a scene between her and an older character:

“. . . ‘he put on some Fleetwood Mac, but I told him I wouldn’t dance to that Clinton music.’

Gus nodded.

‘The stupid neoliberal conception of freedom, the self-absorbed, unchecked ego, that’s what opened the door for this corporate fascism. It allowed everyone to assume it’s their right to have opinions about everything, when there are, in fact, facts in the world,’ she went on. ‘Facts are not disputable.’

Gus rubbed the back of his neck, ‘I kind of like Fleetwood Mac,’ he said quietly.”

When Kinsella has an intelligent angry teenager making this Adbusters like critiques there is something charming about them. They might be overwrought arguments that make you roll your eyes but an angry alienated kid in the Midwest making those comments seems almost nostalgic to me, and it fits into the very anti-intellectual atmosphere of this book. This book isn’t about people who equate social networking to late capitalism terror cells, and they aren’t the type of people who would watch one of the Twin Towers burning from across the street and think, “This is a spectacle of late capitalism’s own demise” (what kind of fucking twat would think that, right?). This is a book about some unremarkable people and their pretty shitty lives… which I’ll use to segue into the next paragraph where I’m going to make the comparison I’ve been dreading making. . . .

This is a shitty lower middle class version of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, or The Corrections about people who we might actually know from our own shitty little towns. I’m not saying this is a Franzen knock-off, but it’s the same basic premise. Three siblings return home and see each other for the first time in years at their grandmother’s funeral. The eldest was a cool guy, the kind of guy who drove a Firebird and listened to The Who and probably had a comb in his back pocket who know works a menial factory job to support his family. The middle child is a woman in her mid-thirties who has just hung up her stripper boots and now slings drinks at the club she used to dance at, and the youngest son is a recovering addict who lives caught up in perpetual twelve steps (his addiction happens to be getting the shit beaten out of him in fights, his character being a weird mixture of Fight Club and Infinite Jest). Intersplicing the present and back stories of the three siblings are the stories of a few other characters who help flush out the novel and give it some offbeat color. I was going to say something about these characters but it would give away a bit too much of how the novel unfolds. And I believe novels should be let to unfold in the way the writers mean for them to unfold and not be ruined by (in)competent reviewers.

I compared this to The Corrections, but this is the family that lives on the other side of the tracks to Franzen’s dysfunctional family and who would have beaten the shit out of The Corrections kids when they were in school.

I’m hoping this review will be good enough to get someone to try to read this novel and hopefully get some enjoyment out of it. Or hate it and then blame me for steering them wrong.

There Is a Book I Turn To Sometimes When I Want To Live In Desire: Rosa Shand's The Gravity of Sunlight

It’s called The Gravity of Sunlight. I often find myself rereading it almost by accident. I flip to the passage I want, and fifty pages later, I can’t put the book down until I finish it again.

I bought my copy in Prague, where I taught English for a year after college, seven years ago now. I was buying a book or two a week then, reading the first few pages and making my decisions based on how deeply the sentences took root. I knew nothing about publishers or publishing. I hadn’t published, but I was starting a novel that I am still working on now, set in Prague and following a year in the life of an American expatriate.

The Gravity of Sunlight is by an author I still know almost nothing about (though I wish I knew more), Rosa Shand. It is set in Uganda just before, and then as, Idi Imin takes power. You can feel the politics in the atmosphere like the electrical charge before a lightning storm. A storm about to the hit the small community of expats that the novel centers around.

Prague is nothing like Uganda, and the expats I knew and the characters I was writing about are hardly similar to the characters in Shand’s book, but the experience of being somewhere very different from the place you came from — an experience most of us share in one way or another — is acutely felt: both the love and fear of that place, both the possibilities and constrictions that such a difference presents.

In The Gravity of Sunlight, Agnes is married to a didactic missionary who works at the local university. He’s an “intellectual” and a bore, who believes she can “will” herself to love him. They have a family (three children), and mostly shared ideals, and at one point they needed each other to escape. But now, of course, the situation has changed. Now Agnes is full of longing for someone else, something else, and is surrounded by potential objects of affection. The novel opens with her attraction to a European man; she has dreams about an African who was once her employee and now has followed her to her new home; there is a woman she may be in love with.

About the ex-employee: “Odinga made an art of the minimum gesture that would catch her attention. . . . At the moment he would know, to the centimeter, where she was. He need only come around to where the bedroom window faced. He would never call or knock. He preferred to let her catch his shadow — it was the fine art of the continent. . . . It would actually be a great release — she accepted now — when Odinga was safely away at Megan’s house. She’d be free of her absurd self-consciousness.”

I can’t remember what I felt reading the book for the first time, but as revisions of my novel spiraled out of control, I thought of The Gravity of Sunlight often. I am telling you: at points, you can hardly breathe for all the desire Agnes feels; it’s like you’re at the bottom of the ocean and you’re holding your breath because if you let it out, the world you are immersed in will crush you. I wanted my characters, and my readers, to feel that way, and I looked carefully at the dreams and reservations Agnes has, where she gives in and what she gives up, the feeling that her longing is more powerful than anything else.

And Africa. “He preferred to let her catch his shadow — it was the fine art of the continent.” The longing for Africa goes beyond characters and story. It seems the book’s longing; when you put down The Gravity of Sunlight, you miss Africa and feel as if you must return there as soon as you can. Because the Uganda of The Gravity of Sunlight is the only place all that desire is possible, and at the end of the novel that Uganda is gone. That, to me, is a book, the only place where something — a feeling, a way of life, a story — is possible.

This Is the Book For All of Us Ready to Confront Our Own Complacency: Kate Zambreno's Green Girl

If you follow other blogs and websites about independent literature and publishing, you may have seen Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl cropping up on a number of lists as one of the best books of 2011. And for good reason — Green Girl is without question one of this past year’s fiercest texts.

In 2007, when I completed my undergraduate major in Women’s and Gender Studies, I had a certain idea about what it meant to work as an artist in service to feminist and social justice movements. As a fiction writer, I felt like it was my responsibility to restore complex, three-dimensional subjectivity to marginalized and “othered” groups, that is, to use the tools of traditional, character-driven storytelling (whether realist or fabulated) to elevate voices that are often silenced and to dispel stereotypes. But after engaging with an array of transgressive and outsider artists past and present, and in the process developing my own vain and at times abrasive queer aesthetics, I have discovered there are other modes and practices that appeal more to my sensibilities. One of these is to write into, rather than counter to abjection, objectification, and stigma.

This is terrain in which Kate Zambreno excels. Her debut O Fallen Angel (which was actually written after Green Girl) was a cartoon grotesquerie, with deliberately performative, confrontational, and one-dimensional characterizations that shined a garish spotlight on American militarism, patriarchy, and conformist consumerism. Green Girl is perhaps more concerned with subjectivity, experience, and emotionality, but a subjectivity that is “shallow,” or is made shallow (by patriarchy, “the culture,” etc). Her protagonist Ruth fashions her identity after “superficial” consumer fashion objects and images from French New Wave cinema. A young American woman living and working abroad in London, Ruth is everything your most narrow-minded creative writing workshop classmates told you wouldn’t work. Rather than initiating her own dramatic arc, she is passive and reactive. Rather than having a clear objective, she is never clear what she wants, nor is it fully clear to the reader. She welcomes our gaze, then shuns it. She is the young girl as described by the poet Kate Durbin: “She is begging to be loved; she is grossed out by your attention.”

Zambreno presents us with a girl subject whose lived experiences of depression and alienation many of us would prefer to avoid. In her blurb for the book, Durbin says Zambreno implicates “Ruth’s vacancy as our own.” But so too does she implicate us as possessors of the gaze, or as those with the power to pull the young girl’s strings: Green Girl is brilliantly narrated by a maternal figure who is alternately sadistic and nurturing; this narrator self-consciously pokes and prods Ruth to see whether there is any “there” there, then holds Ruth together to prevent her from cracking.

Author Lidia Yuknavitch says Zambreno’s language creates its own “poetics of desire.” Nowhere is this more evident than in her rendering of Ruth’s job in retail, hawking a celebrity fragrance that is itself cleverly named “Desire.” “Would you like to sample desire?” is Ruth’s futile chorus to disinterested passersby, and her failure to move product becomes her failure as an object of desire.

More than anything else I’ve ever read, Zambreno’s prose captures, in a visceral way, how retail invades the bodies and psyches of its workers. And of course retail is not just retail. Retail is capitalism, patriarchy, misogyny, adultism, stigmatization of mental illness, and perhaps most importantly, lest I make this to macro and silence her yet again, retail is the context in which we as readers encounter a particular type of abject girl subject, in which we encounter Ruth. As an artist, Kate Zambreno is profoundly non-complacent, and this is the book for all of us ready to confront our own complacency.  This is a vital book, a necessary book, a book I will long treasure.

An Author Who Was Trying To Transcend Plot: On Henry James's The Wings of the Dove

A number of years ago, I became very interested in what I thought of as Henry James’s best book, The Turn of the Screw­­. In particular, I believed that one hundred years of critical study had missed the point of it completely, and I had a better idea (which I still believe to be true).  It’s only recently, however — in the wake of completing the manuscript for a short book about the correspondence of Henry James and his philosopher brother William — that I’ve come to realize that I thought of The Turn of the Screw as Henry James’s best book only because it was the one I could understand.

James had a lot of problems with people understanding him — most notably, William — and to this day he has a kind of writer’s-writer grudgingly granted Master-status. Tooling around on Facebook, I’m surprised to see him so infrequently listed (as in never, so far) among folks’ favorite books or authors. If he is discussed these days, it’s for his famous ghost story, which mostly gets used to justify the recent glut of crossover literary/genre books.

But there’s a problem with that: James didn’t think a whole lot of The Turn of the Screw. No, scratch that. He did like the book, he thought he’d executed it perfectly — he just didn’t prefer it. It was too obviously commercial. James wrote a lot of things for money in his life, and occasionally he was craven in doing so, but he always recognized it for what it was. He didn’t like unambitious writers, or writers who wrote only one kind of thing, and he criticized “vulgar,” tasteless audiences, too — ones that wanted to be told only stories that were exactly like stories they had already been told.

So what were James’s new stories? Well, they were the big novels that I didn’t think were his best work. I had told myself that my problem with them was that I just couldn’t get all that worked up about whether some young girl was going to marry. Without really knowing it, I was signing on to a familiar take on James — his fascination with the lives of young women spoke probably to some latent facet of his psychology or personality. AKA, he was gay. But the truth is, that’s stupid. I don’t know whether James was gay, and neither do you, and neither of us should care. And more important, these books are much better than The Turn of the Screw, and I had to write a book of my own to figure out why. (It’ll appear, by the way, from the University of Iowa Press in Fall 2012!)

And that brings me to my real recommendation here — The Wings of the Dove. I’m not going to bother telling you the plot of the book at all, because that’s kind of the point I’m trying to make. Most book reviews these days are ninety percent plot summary — so is it any surprise that we have trouble understanding an author who was trying to transcend plot? The plot of The Wings of the Dove doesn’t matter; it’s how the story’s told that makes the difference. Which means that if you’ve seen the movie, then you don’t understand anything at all about the book.

How’s it told?  It’s almost entirely without events. That is, it’s almost all character interiority — you’re in the mind of a character, riding sidecar to their consciousness, as they mull away on some upcoming event, and then suddenly, whoosh, the event has come and gone, and now the character is recalling the event, characterizing it in retrospect. Through almost the whole book — and it’s a big book — almost nothing just outright happens.

To understand why he would do this, we have to go back in time a little bit. For James, just about everything returns to Balzac (e.g. the plot of Eugenie Grandet sounds so much like a Jamesian plot it’s not even funny). Late in his life, in an essay called “The Lesson of Balzac,” James described Balzac as a “painterly” writer, and a monk. It’s the painter part I want to focus on (though if we were to all think of James as a monk, too, we’d probably have much more intelligent discussions about him).

Henry and William James were both more or less reared in the nursery of museums, and you’ll have to take my word for it that Henry said on a number of occasions that what he wanted to do, as a writer, was what he thought he saw happening in the history of art. What was that? Well, after the invention of perspective — depth — paintings were divided into foregrounds and backgrounds. Often you had a portrait in the foreground — Virgins and Jesuses — and in the background you’d have some kind of landscape, maybe some ruins. As time passed (art historians, please sheath your sabers — this is not an art history lecture), artists started to get more and more interested in that background. The background, in other words, climbed into the foreground: thus, the shift from portrait painting to landscape painting. In the avant garde — though Henry didn’t know this — something else was happening: even though the background became the foreground, it didn’t come into any kind of focus. Hello, impressionism!

Now that’s a terribly, terribly, terribly simplified version of things — but it does seem to jibe with how Henry James basically thought of it, and he articulated as much in a story that described the illustrations of a particular edition of Sleeping Beauty. In short, he noted how the blurry background of an image seemed to tug on the imagination, how it triggered something like a stream of thought, a reverie of images. That’s what he wanted his fiction to do — inspire readerly reverie.

So how does The Wings of the Dove do that? Well, in a story, the plot is the foreground — the events, the dialogue, the action. What’s in the background, often unstated (think Hemingway, Carver, etc.), is the meandering minds of the characters who have mulled these events in advance, and who will reflect on them in retrospect. The Wings of the Dove, like the art that Henry wanted to emulate, inverts the background and the foreground so that all we get are blurry impressions of events — blurry impressions that are truer to a reality the confusion and ambiguity of which we fool ourselves by denying.

When I reread The Wings of the Dove for my book, I started to see it like this, as James wanted me to see it — I started to make out the shapes in the fog. My old anxieties faded away. I found that I cared a whole lot less about who was going to wind up marrying whom than I did about recognizing the mind wheeling there on the page, streaming and reverieing away — didn’t it seem a little similar to mine? That, I realized with a jolt, was the whole point.