Arthur Phillips: The King at the Edge of the World

The King at the Edge of the World – Arthur Phillips – 9780812995480 – Random House – Hardcover- 288 pages – $27.00 – February 11, 2020. Ebooks available at lower prices.

At Writerscast, there is a strict rule that I only talk to authors whose books I like. So every book that appears here is one that I truly enjoyed reading. Given that fact, it is important to note that Arthur Phillips’ novel, The King at the Edge of the World, is a book I loved reading. It is a great story by a writer in full command of his craft.

I hate giving away plot so I won’t even come close to doing that. Suffice to say, this book takes place at the end of the Elizabethan era (the first Elizabeth, that is). It involves a series of events that lead inexorably to a glorious and satisfying conclusion, beginning with the arrival of a Turkish doctor to England as part of a diplomatic mission and going through a series of sometimes unfortunate and even tragic events. What develops from this quiet beginning is what makes this book so pleasurable to read. And it is full of ideas, ruminations, wonderful characters, all woven together to create a fabric that wraps around you like an old and very comfortable shawl.

“The book is a delightfully rich fruitcake and an old-fashioned pleasure to read; its plot is an intricate set of intersecting mechanisms and locks and keys, which, when they finally all fall into place, provide the reader with the gawping satisfaction of having been well and truly fooled,” Dominic Dromgoole writes in his review. “Simply writing for the reader’s pleasure seems to be increasingly rare these days, and to pick up a book like The King at the Edge of the World, which contains teasing philosophical and theological ideas within an unapologetic entertainment, is a small mercy for which much gratitude is due.”

A New York Times Editor’s Choice selection

I’ve spoken to Arthur before. In 2009 – so long ago, it seems – we talked about an earlier novel of his, The Song is You, another wonderful book. Arthur is a distant relative of mine and it is a wonderful thing to have such a terrific writer in the family.

Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a failed entrepreneur, and strikingly, he as been a five-time Jeopardy! champion.

His first novel, Prague, was a New York Times Notable Book, and received the Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for best first novel. His second novel, The Egyptologist, was an international bestseller in 2004. His third novel, Angelica, made The Washington Post list of best fiction of 2007 and that paper called him “One of the best writers in America.” The Song Is You was a New York Times Notable Book, and Kirkus wrote, “Phillips still looks like the best American novelist to have emerged in the present decade.” His fifth book, The Tragedy of Arthur, was published in 2011 to critical acclaim, and like its predecessors, and was named a New York Times Notable Book.

The play taken from that book received its world premiere reading at New York’s Public Theater in 2011 and became a full stage production in 2013, under the auspices of the Guerrilla Shakespeare Project. His short story, Companionship, was adapted into an opera by Rachel Peters and debuted at the Fort Worth Opera in 2019.

The film version of Angelica was released in 2015, and other films based on his work are currently in development. His work has been published in twenty-seven languages.

He has written for television, including Damages (FX/DirecTV), Bloodline (Netflix), Tokyo Vice (HBOMax) and he has further television pilots in development.

Arthur lives in New York City with his two sons.

Reading Arthur Phillips novels is always a deep pleasure for me. Talking to Arthur Phillips about his writing is similarly always a pleasure.

Learn more about Arthur Phillips at his website.

The wonderful bookstore, RJ Julia, in Madison, Connecticut, carries all the books we talk about here. You can purchase a copy of The King at the Edge of the World from them right here.

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Fred Waitzkin: Deep Water Blues, a Novel

Deep Water Blues: A Novel – Fred Waitzkin – 9781504057745 – 160 pages – Open Road Media – paperback – May 28, 2019 – $17.00 – ebook versions available at lower prices.

Fred Waitzkin’s Deep Water Blues is a surprisingly affecting short novel based to a great extent on his personal experiences in a small boat on the open water and islands of the Caribbean. Because it is based in so much lived experience, it has an authenticity that shines through in every page. In Deep Water Blues three older men (including the boat’s owner) and one younger man, a painter who has never been to sea, leave Ft. Lauderdale on an old boat heading for a Bahamian island that has an almost mythical story and appeal. Each is there for a different reason and each will gain something different from their adventure. But the story is really about the island and the mysteries of what happened there.

When I first started reading this book, I did not expect to find it as compelling as I did in the end. There’s alot more here than initially meets the eye, and this is a book I can recommend to readers.

Waitzkin calls his book a “curated blend of real-life experience and fiction.” Deep Water Blues tells a compelling story about an unusual man in an exotic place, an almost mythical story whose hero suffers a classic fate and redemption in a mysterious and beautiful location, bringing to mind Shakespearean and Biblical storytelling. Waitzkin writes in spare prose that carries his story through to its exciting end, and makes a short book impactful beyond its length.

Fred Waitzkin was born in Cambridge Massachusetts. He was an English major at Kenyon College in Ohio, then taught English at The College of the Virgin Islands, where he also got to pursue his love of fishing for big game fish. Fred and his wife moved to New York City, where Waitzkin wrote feature journalism, personal essays and reviews for numerous magazines including Esquire, Forbes, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Outside Magazine, and Sports Illustrated.

Waitzkin’s first book was Searching for Bobby Fischer. Published in 1984, it’s the story of three years in the lives of Fred and his chess prodigy son, Josh Waitzkin. The book became an internationally acclaimed best seller, and the film based on it was nominated for an academy award.

Mortal Games, his biography of world chess champion, Garry Kasparov was published in 1993, and was followed in 2000 by The Last Marlin, a memoir. The Dream Merchant, Waitzkin’s first novel, was published in 2013 – Deep Water Blues is his second published work of fiction. Fred still lives in Manhattan with his wife Bonnie, and still spends as much time as possible on his old boat, Ebb Tide.

It was my pleasure to speak with Fred, and while we talked about the book at hand, our conversation went into a variety of related coves and channels.

Visit Fred Waitzkin’s website to learn more about him and his writing.

“Deep Water Blues does what all fine literature aspires for – it transports readers to another time and place, in this case, to a sleepy, lush island deep in the Bahamas. Fred Waitzkin writes about life, sex and violence with aplomb, and Bobby Little is a tragic hero fit for the Greek myths. Hope to see everyone on Rum Cay soon.” – Matt Gallagher, author of Youngblood

“Fred Waitzkin effortlessly recreates a singular world with uncanny insight and humor. His language is remarkable for its clarity and simplicity. Yet his themes are profound. This is like sitting by a fire with a master storyteller whose true power is in the realm of imagination and magic.” – Gabriel Byrne, actor and director

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Peter Rock: The Night Swimmers (A Novel)

The Night Swimmers – A Novel – Peter Rock – ISBN 9781641290005 – Soho Press – Hardcover – 272 pages – $25.00 – March 12, 2019 – ebook versions available at lower prices.

As I have said here before, one of the things I like best about doing the Writerscast interviews is that it’s introduced me to the work of many writers I would not have discovered on my own. The Night Swimmers is a perfect example. Peter Rock has been writing extremely fine fiction for many years, and yet I had never run across his work before, which still seems quite surprising to me, given the nature of his work.

Peter’s autobiographical novel captured my imagination from the outset. The writing is luminous and personal, dreamy, yet descriptive. His narrator is a young aspiring writer living temporarily in beautiful Door County in the northern reaches of Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan coastline. He’s bit lost, maybe stuck in his inability to see himself as an adult. He meets a young widow, Mrs. Abel, who is, like him, not exactly clear about herself and who she wants to be. She is older, attractive, smart and mysterious. The narrator finds himself swimming with Mrs. Abel at night without really knowing why, although there is a strong undercurrent of attraction between them, a tension that defines the essential mystery of their relationship, and the way they swim in the depths of the lake across large distances is similar to the ebb and flow of the narrator’s own life. And then Mrs. Abel disappears.

Some twenty years later, the narrator, who is now married, living in San Francisco and the father of two daughters, finds himself trying once again to understand what happened that summer, his psychic history rising to capture him like a deep lake current he used to swim in. He reads old letters and notebooks from the past, explores his relationship to a former lover, tries to understand through a sort of personal archeological expedition the world he once lived in and still cannot fully understand. Back in Door County once again, he tries to find out what happened to the elusive Mrs. Abel, and again he enters the deep lake waters to swim across the night.

Scattered throughout the book is the evidence of the narrator’s archeological exploration of his own history, pieces of paper, old emails, quotations from poets, and references to the extraordinary and strange psychic photographer Ted Serios. This book is a sort of literary pastiche that really could exist in multiple forms and formats, reflecting the author’s psychic imagination crossing over time and space through the medium of memory.

The Night Swimmers is a beautiful, complicated and challenging work of literary inspiration I found completely engaging. And it was a pleasure then, to have the opportunity to speak with Peter Rock about his fine novel.

“Peter Rock has written a weird and haunting story about a younger man and an older woman who like to swim in the dark. Happily The Night Swimmers is no male coming of age story. Instead their secret nightly practice in a dark and foreboding lake shimmers as a queer refusal for either of them to grow up right.”
—Eileen Myles, author of Afterglow

I recommend visiting Rock’s website, and follow the link to The Night Swimmers page, where there are some great visuals related to the book.

Peter Rock was born and raised in Salt Lake City. He is the author of several novels SPELLS, Klickitat, The Shelter Cycle, My Abandonment, The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, Carnival Wolves and This Is the Place, as well as a story collection, The Unsettling. Rock attended Deep Springs College, received a BA in English from Yale University, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is a Professor in the English Department of Reed College. Leave No Trace, the film adaptation of My Abandonment, directed by Debra Granik, premiered at Sundance and Cannes and was released in 2018.

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Bram Presser: The Book of Dirt (a novel)

The Book of Dirt – Bram Presser –  Text Publishing Company (Australia) – Paperback – 9781925240269 – 325 pages – $15.95 – September 11, 2018 – ebook versions available at lower prices

Personal and family history for most contemporary Jews is frequently fraught. Most of us have relatives who disappeared without a trace, except for scattered entries in German records of extermination. Some fewer of us have had living relatives whose lives were entwined with and defined by the Holocaust, almost always in horrific and devastating ways.

Bram Presser, an Australian punk rocker and practicing attorney who also happens to be a brilliant writer, spent eight years working on this novel, The Book of Dirt. It is a fabulous story that explores the real life story of Presser’s grandfather, Jakub Rand, from the 1920s onward through the Holocaust and beyond. Presser addresses history in all its complexity with the only tool that could possibly make sense of it – imagination.

Presser starts with family stories and personal legends, combined with archival research and interviews to create this novel. Of course it becomes partly fact, partly fiction. Some is memory and much is imagined.

The relatively large number of characters and the movement between places can be confusing for the reader, but Bram Presser’s grandfather, Jakub Rand, and his grandmother, Dasa Roubicek, and their immediate family are the focus of the book, and their story of survival shines through. The pain and suffering was immense and the power of humanity was as well.

You do not need to be Jewish to find this novel compelling and real. All of us can share through this novel what it means to find hope, and for the descendants of survivors of terror and loss to try to understand the stories of their forebears. This is a wonderful and transformative literary work.

The Book of Dirt has won a number of well-deserved awards in Australia. Bram Presser was born in Melbourne in 1976. He has been a punk rocker, an academic and a criminal attorney. He writes the blog Bait For Bookworms and is a founding member of Melbourne Jewish Book Week. His stories have appeared in Vice Magazine, The Sleepers Almanac, Best Australian Stories, Award Winning Australian Writing and Higher Arc. In 2011, Bram won The Age Short Story Award. Presser’s own website is very active and includes a great deal of material related to the stories behind The Book of Dirt; it is worthwhile to explore.

‘Meet Bram Presser, aged five, smoking a cigarette with his grandmother in Prague. Meet Jakub Rand, one of the Jews chosen to assemble the Nazi’s Museum of the Extinct Race. Such details, like lightning flashes, illuminate this audacious work about the author’s search for the grandfather he loved but hardly knew. Working in the wake of writers like Modiano and Safran Foer, Presser brilliantly shows how fresh facts can derail old truths, how fiction can amplify memory. A smart and tender meditation on who we become when we attempt to survive survival.’
Mireille Juchau

I hope you enjoy listening to Bram Presser talk about The Book of Dirt, a book I strongly recommend you seek out and read.

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Rae DelBianco: Rough Animals (A Novel)

Rough Animals – Rae DelBianco – Arcade Publishing – hardcover – 9781628729733 – $24.99 – June 5, 2018 – ebook editions available at lower prices.

I’ve long believed that Cormac McCarthy is the most recent heir to the position held previously by William Faulkner, being the most intense and stimulating writer of his generation. Having read this first novel by the young writer, Rae DelBianco, I believe she will be the next in line to wear that particular literary crown. I do not believe I have read any fiction recently that is as powerful and hallucinatory as Rough Animals. The book grabs you by the head and heart immediately and simply never lets go. It can be painful, even horrific in places, to read this book. But I was captivated by the writing, the characters and the story – and found it impossible to put the book down. I needed to take breaks from reading this book, a sort of breath-catching effort is required for the reader to regather oneself, and be ready for the next emotional ride. And the descriptions of landscape, of animals and of people are simply stunning.

Intense is not quite enough to describe this novel. So after reading this book, and gathering my wits about me, I was really interested to talk to author DelBianco. I honestly don’t know how she managed to pull off this high-wire effort – writing a novel with this level of luminescence is just hard to do. Rough Animals is about a brother and sister who grow up hardscrabble on a small ranch in the very isolated Box Elder canyon of Utah. When the novel opens, and it does so with a scene that is at once powerful, artful, violent, and gripping, in a way that presages so much of the writing and storyline of the rest of the book, we are simply unprepared for the range, the depth of language and vision DelBianco exhibits.

The book goes on from there, McCarthy-like, in a spiritual saga of sometimes unexplainable violence and tenderness, across a brutal moon-like western landscape. The people in this book are sometimes like aliens, blasting themselves through a foreign galaxy on their way to discovering what it means to be a human being, while never really understanding how they got here in the first place.

Amazingly, for someone who has captured the language and beauty of the western landscape so well, DelBianco is actually not from the west. She grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a beautiful area not that far from Philadelphia, and she now lives in rural New Jersey, on a farm with her grandmother. How this author was able to transport herself into the modern wild west is a feat of almost superhuman imagination, with which I remain in awe. Delbianco has clearly set her sights on high ground, and with this novel, and has achieved something really remarkable – this is truly a brilliant first novel.

DelBianco has found her voice as a writer, and it’s a great one. I really recommend seeking out this novel and carving out a good block of time to spend with it. You will be richly rewarded. And I think hearing her talk about this novel, her writing, and the backstory behind this novel will make you want to read more from this new author.

Here is the author’s website, which is well worth a visit.

An interview with Rae DelBianco in Vogue magazine here. And Kirkus wrote a very good review of the book as well, here.

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Peter Donahue: Three Sides Water (Short Novels)

Three Sides Water – short novels – Peter Donahue – Ooligan Press – paperback – 978-1-932010-98-5 – $17 – ebook versions available at lower prices – May 1, 2018

Ooligan Press is an unusual publishing operation; it’s a Portland, Oregon based independent publisher that draws its books from the rich literary communities of the Pacific Northwest. Founded in 2001, Ooligan is also a teaching press dedicated to the art and craft of publishing. Affiliated with Portland State University, the press is staffed by students pursuing master’s degrees in an apprenticeship program under the guidance of a core faculty of publishing professionals. This gives the press a continual sense of transformation and rebirth as the people involved with it change so frequently. I’ve made a number of literary discoveries through Ooligan’s diverse and very literate offerings.

I am really pleased that Ooligan decided to send me Peter Donahue’s unusual collection called Three Sides Water.  The book is a collection of three short novels that I was immediately drawn to. And once I started reading the first novel, I was completely hooked. Donahue has been writing about the Olympic peninsula of Washington for some time. While he no longer lives there, clearly the area west and north of Seattle has captivated his imagination. Three Sides Water follows the construct of a peninsula itself – three stories surrounded by the space beyond. Each of the book’s short novels is about young characters, all in very different time periods, learning what it means to take responsibility for their own lives, and all of them must make decisions that will have long lasting consequences for themselves and others in their lives.

In his writing, Donahue literally inhabits the landscape of the far northwestern edge of our country with these stories. There’s a certain exoticism he brings us, with a careful eye and precise descriptive language that never gets in the way of the stories he is telling. His characters are all very different but share a common desire to become “something” – whether it is more, or better, or simply the desire to become an authentic self. The Pacific Northwest’s Olympic Peninsula is a itself a dramatic element, within which his compelling characters do what they must to establish the arcs of their lives, all in different ways and with different means, but all operating from the deepest part of their selves. The stories share common traits but are set in completely different time periods and tell very different tales, making this collection great fun to read.

Peter Donahue has published two full length novels, Clara and Merritt and Madison House (winner of the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction), as well as a collection of short stories, The Cornelius Arms. He is the co-editor of two literary anthologies, Reading Seattle and Reading Portland, and of Seven Years on the Pacific Slope, a 1914 memoir set in Washington’s Methow Valley. Since 2005, he has written the Retrospective Review column on Northwest literature for Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History, published by the Washington State Historical Society. Donahue teaches at Wenatchee Valley College in Omak, a small rural campus in North-Central Washington. More about Peter Donahue and his work can be found at his website here.  And learn about the interesting Ooligan Press at its website here.

Peter Donahue is a fine story teller and an excellent interviewee as well. Thanks to him and to Ooligan for this excellent book.

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Dara Horn: Eternal Life – A Novel

Eternal Life – A Novel – Dara Horn – W.W. Norton – Hardcover – 978-0393608533 – 256 pages – $25.95 – ebook versions available at lower prices – January 23, 2018

I have to admit I had some trepidation about reading this novel, when I first approached it. I was aware that Dara Horn is a brilliant writer, but I was afraid, after learning the premise of this book, that it would be too difficult for her to transform the material into an effective novel. Much to my surprise, this book swept me off my feet.

I had asked myself the question — would I really want to read a book about someone who has had the blessing of eternal life? Could this idea, something that has been explored so often by so many writers and thinkers in the past, really work? Would she manage to avoid the triteness of writing about eternal life?

Happily, Horn tackles this concept with originality and utter charm, avoiding the predictable at every turn, to give us a rich novel that resonates with the joys and painfulness of life. It turns out that a well told story of eternal life has much to teach us mere mortals about our own lives. And her mastery of Jewish mysticism, history, and modern culture envelopes the reader completely.

Rachel and Elazar’s story begins in the time of the Roman occupation of Jerusalem, when, as young lovers, they must make a bargain with God they do not fully understand until much later in their live – much later. They are doomed to live forever, their lives intersecting and completely entwined, each living out experiences with multitudes of families and children, repeating a seeming endless cycle of love and loss without redemption. By the time they have reached the twenty first century, Rachel has had enough of living, and truly wishes to die.

“The hard part isn’t living forever,” Rachel observes. “It’s making life worth living.” That’s the challenge for all of us, and the way Dara Horn tells Rachel’s story, it is impossible not to face up to our own understanding of our common humanity.

This is a terrific book, one which will surprise and delight you with its complicated story, and vivid interweaving of Jewish history into modern life. And it was great to have a chance to talk to the ever interesting and erudite Dara Horn about the mysteries and challenges of Eternal Life.

Dara Horn received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University, studying Hebrew and Yiddish. In 2007 she was chosen by Granta magazine as one of 20 “Best Young American Novelists.” Her first four novels have won many awards. She has taught courses in Jewish literature and Israeli history at Sarah Lawrence College and City University of New York, and was a Visiting Professor in Jewish Studies at Harvard. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children. You can read more about Dara at her well put together website here.

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Claire Messud: The Burning Girl (A Novel)

The Burning Girl – Claire Messud – W.W. Norton – Hardcover – 9780393635027 – 256 pages – $25.95 – ebook versions available at lower prices – August 20, 2017 (paperback forthcoming June 5, 2018)

The Burning Girl is an extraordinary novel. Messud, whose work and reputation I knew of, but had never read before discovering this, her newest book, is an exceptional novelist. Her writing is luminous and almost magical; she is able to inhabit characters and tell stories from within them in an assured and sympathetic voice. This is a beautiful, sometimes disturbing, and very powerful work, a book that has stayed with me since reading it.

The story is about two young girls, Julia, and her best childhood friend Cassie. The book is initially about their friendship and their adventures together, and the way the closeness of two girl friends can be so important to the very young. But then it turns to the changes that occur as the two girls get older and find themselves taking different directions in their young lives. Julia is a golden girl and Cassie is not. Cassie’s life is a struggle simply to be who she is in an impossible circumstance, where Julia’s feels centered – as much as any adolescent life can actually be centered in the modern world.

But this is not just an interior novel of psychology and being. Messud tells a good story with grace and sureness. Julia and Cassie ultimately do come back together in a dramatic way, and what happens to the girls is complicated and emotionally draining both for the characters and for the reader.

Writing from and about children creates complications and challenges for any writer. In my opinion, Messud has met that challenge, and has given us a vivid portrait of the tragedies that lurk beneath the surface of modern digitally enabled culture. Her story makes us wonder about what is going on in the families all around us, the complicated circumstances and emotional challenges that face so many today, a world of hidden pain and sorrow for far too many.

Claire Messud really impressed me with this book. And while it was a painful book to read at times, the emotional and intellectual reward was worth the journey. It was a pleasure for me to have the opportunity to talk with her about writing and the story she told in The Burning Girl.

Claire studied at Yale and Cambridge and has taught literature and writing at a number of colleges and universities and is on the editorial board of The Common, a literary magazine at Amherst College. She  is a recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Burning Girl is her seventh novel; The Emperor’s Children was a New York Times best seller. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.

Visit Claire Messud’s website here to find out more about her work. And there is a good interview with Claire in the Guardian from 2013 that is worth a read as well.

I am still surprised that I had not read this author’s work before – and am now a dedicated Messud reader, looking forward to reading the rest of her earlier novels, and looking forward to her next. I think you will enjoy our conversation about this book.

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Bill Schubart: Lila and Theron (A Novel)

Lila and Theron (A Novel) – Bill Schubart – Charles Michael Publishing – Hardcover — 9781682613566 – 192 pages- $19.95 – ebook versions available at lower prices – June 6, 2017

This small book is short and sweet in a very good way. Through well written fiction, the book documents and celebrates an imagined place and people in time, that have only recently disappeared from the American landscape. It’s difficult for most of us moderns to imagine life without all the technological conveniences we have come to take for granted today. It was not that many years ago that the isolated mountain communities of northern Vermont were still home to small farmers, whose daily lives were closer in rhythm to the nineteenth century than to even the twentieth, much less the technologically advanced twenty first century of today. Some of these hardy folk still farmed with horses into the 1960s, and many small-scale daily and truck farming operations managed by dint of endless toil, to support the families on the land they had worked for generations.

To most of us, these lives will be as foreign as science fiction. Harsh circumstances often make people harsh, but Schubart’s characters find a way to access their humanity despite all the struggles of life which which they must cope. It’s a joy to get to know these characters and to share the stories of their lives. Schubart, now in his seventies, bridges this time frame. He grew up in northern Vermont, and while his life experience was vastly different from the farm people he writes about here, these are people he knew and loved during the his youth, and it benefits us all that he has brought them to life in this lovely novel.

Thelma dies at nineteen giving birth to a son, Theron. When the son first meets his father, he learns his mother’s death is his fault and can only muster the question, “How did she die?”

Looking away, the father mutters, “She died givin’ birth ta you. An’ I lost all her help and comforts.”

“I have long considered Bill Schubart to be the wisest columnist in America. That same wisdom, deep life experience, and empathy come shining through on every page of his new novel, Lila and Theron. Full of joy, sadness, humor, and insight, Lila and Theron is a clear-eyed celebration of our almost boundless capacity, despite all our human frailties, to love both one another and the place we call home. Over the years, I have known many true and good country people like Lila and Theron, whom I have been proud and honored to call my friends. This is a beautiful book.” – Howard Frank Mosher, author of Marie Blythe and Walking to Gatlinburg.

Bill Schubart has lived with his family in Vermont since 1947. He writes about Vermont in fiction, humor and opinion pieces, is the author of several books, is a regular commentator on Vermont Public Radio, and active in Vermont community and political life. Learn more about him and his work at his website.

It was a true pleasure for me to share a conversation about Vermont and its people, small-scale farming, and the art of fiction with my old friend, Bill Schubart.

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Jessica Anya Blau: The Trouble with Lexie

The Trouble with Lexie: A Novel – Jessica Anya Blau – HarperCollins – paperback – 9780062416452 – 336 pages – $14.99 – ebook versions available at lower prices.

I interviewed Jessica Anya Blau in 2014 about her previous book, The Wonder Bread Summer, which I found to be wonderfully entertaining and fun to read. Her latest novel, The Trouble with Lexie, displays Blau’s signature wit and fast paced story telling. But it is a complicated book with a seriously flawed and emotionally scarred main character, who faces a very challenging situation in her life.

The book’s opening is pretty compelling (as book openings should be!):

The problem wasn’t so much that Lexie had taken the
Klonopin. And it wasn’t even really that she had stolen
them . . . the problem, as Lexie saw it, was that she had
fallen asleep in the bed of the owner of the Klonopin.
And the owner of the Klonopin was the wife of her lover.

Lexie is an engaging and sometimes irritating main character. As we watch her try to figure out her life, I suspect most readers will want to reach into the pages of the book and tell Lexie directly when she is about to make a big mistake. But she is on her own path and we must follow along as she makes her way toward and through disaster.

Lexie James makes for a terrific main character. She is funny and thoughtful, comes from a decidedly untraditional family, and as a relatively young adult, has figured out how to conquer her panic attacks. She is also engaged to a truly nice guy, and has a job as a counselor at a prestigious private school (presumably in Massachusetts).

But with the wedding fast approaching, Lexie is faced with doubts about her future and who she really wants to be. She falls into a wild love affair with an older married man, a typically bad decision that readers know will have serious consequences.

Most of us have been in similarly fraught situations at one time or another, always convincing ourselves that we’re different and “everything will work out” when we know that is not really true.

Lexie’s story is an example of that central human foible, a form of hubris that makes us believe we can beat all the odds when we want something so much we know we cannot possibly attain. What makes this novel work is that despite knowing that she is headed for a cliff, we end up liking Lexie so much that we want to believe there is a better future for her, and by extension for ourselves. You will have to read the book to find out how this one turns out, no spoilers here.

I very much enjoy talking to Jessica about her books, her characters and stories, and hope you will find our conversation as enjoyable and entertaining as it was for me.

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