A LIFE IN WORDS

IBS: The Brooklyn Follies is at once complex, hugely allusive, and superbly easygoing. It’s set in your own neighborhood just before the disaster of 9/11 changed the world, with a cast of intriguing characters: the ailing narrator, his group of friends who are all ordinary people living through everyday trials and tribulations, the slightly obtuse but perfect and beautiful mother, the nephew with his literary obsessions and dreams of an escape from modern American reality. The book is especially critical of the political climate around the 2000 election and takes a very dim view of fanatical Christian sects. At the same time, it’s one of your funniest books.

PA: The Brooklyn Follies is the only book I deliberately set out to write as a comedy. By comic I don’t mean farce. The characters suffer, and, of course, the book has a dark, dark conclusion: it ends forty-six minutes before the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. I wanted to talk about life in New York before 9/11. How lucky we were to have our small problems, our little pains and aches and sufferings—the things that make us human. Then, when the cataclysm comes, it wipes out all our trivial concerns. I kept thinking about something Billy Wilder once said: “If you’re feeling good about yourself and the world, that’s the moment to write a tragedy. But when you’re down in the dumps, write a comedy.” I was down in the dumps about, well, just about everything when I wrote Brooklyn Follies, not just 9/11 but also the Bush administration, the 2000 elections, and the buildup to the war in Iraq—the whole bloody American mess. I needed to look at life in a different way.

IBS: Yes, there’s a lightness here that the critics have perceived either as a new avenue in your writing or as a return to pure storytelling. One thing I’ve learned through our discussions is that what is easy to read was often very challenging, very difficult to write, and so, I was wondering whether this was the case with The Brooklyn Follies?

PA: It was a problem book. There was something I couldn’t figure out, and when I finally sat down to write it in around 1997–1998, the structure was . . .

PA: Yes. It began as a different book altogether. But we’ve already talked about that in our discussion of Timbuktu. Once I removed Willy and Mr. Bones, the structure of the book collapsed, and I didn’t know what to do with it anymore. I had Tom and Aurora, Harry and Rufus, the B.P.M., but I no longer knew what to do with them. So, the whole thing went into a drawer for a number of years. It wasn’t until I came up with the idea of using Nathan as the narrator that I was able to reassemble the characters and make a story out of it.

PA: Yes, but the book doesn’t dwell that much on Nathan. It’s about everyone else around him. Nathan’s story is a kind of resurrection story: he goes through divorce, cancer, a phase of bitter disgust, and a general feeling that his life is over. Little by little, he finds a new way to live, new friends, new loves—a way of rejoining the human circus.

IBS: Just like Sidney in Oracle Night. I mean, in later years you’ve often focused on weakened characters.

PA: It’s true. There was a whole sequence of them. In one way or another, all those characters were in decline.

PA: Aging and/or ailing, I guess. But putting that aside for now, let’s talk about the rascals and straight shooters. Most of the protagonists in my books have been straight shooters—what I would call earnest seekers. They are not people who commit crimes. They have moral integrity. Then there are the rascals like Pozzi in The Music of Chance, Willy in Timbuktu, and Walt in Mr. Vertigo. In The Brooklyn Follies, Nathan is a bit of a rascal, but he’s also a grown-up, a man with a past carrying around his accumulated burdens. Think of the chapter entitled “On Rascals.” I think it’s fundamental to understanding the book, even if, at first glance, it doesn’t seem terribly important. As you’ll remember, Nathan and Tom are discussing Jacob and Esau.

“The bad guy wins, and God doesn’t punish him. It didn’t seem right. It still doesn’t seem right.”

“Of course it does. Jacob had the spark of life in him, and Esau was a dumbbell. Good-hearted, yes, but a dumbbell. If you’re going to choose one of them to lead your people, you’ll want the fighter, the one with cunning and wit, the one with the energy to beat the odds and come out on top. You choose the strong and clever over the weak and kind.”

“That’s pretty brutal stuff, Nathan. Take your argument one step further, and the next thing you’ll be telling me is that Stalin should be revered as a great man.”

“Stalin was a thug, a psychotic murderer. I’m talking about the instinct for survival, Tom, the will to live. Give me a wily rascal over a pious sap any day of the week. He might not always play by the rules, but he’s got spirit. And when you find a man with spirit, there’s still some hope for the world.” (53–54)

IBS: Well, “the bad guy wins,” but in your work they do so only after they’ve suffered and developed a measure of integrity.

PA: Bad guys with integrity. I like that. The Brooklyn Follies is a bit of a departure for me, but only a bit, since in some ways it resembles the screenplay of Smoke. A group of ordinary people in a Brooklyn neighborhood, the struggles of being alive, the forming of new friendships, new alliances, new loves, an ensemble work dealing with several characters at once. My two comedies. One a book, the other a film.

IBS: Are there any autobiographical references? Nathan’s heart attack, which turned out to be an inflamed esophagus?

PA: Yes, that was something that happened to me. What else? The B.P.M.⁵⁵ is based on a real person. When my daughter Sophie was little, I used to walk her to school on Carroll Street every morning, and—just as I describe it in the book—every morning there was a lovely young woman sitting on the front steps of her house with her two little children—waiting for the school bus. I never talked to her, but I saw her every single day, five days a week for several years. She seemed so comfortable with her children, so deeply in harmony with them that I started calling her the “Beautiful Perfect Mother,” the B.P.M. I based that character on her. As I said, I don’t know the real person at all, but a strange thing happened while I was writing the book. By then, Sophie attended a different school, so I hadn’t seen the B.P.M. in a number of years. Then, on the very day I introduced her into the book, I went out for lunch and saw her walking down the street.

PA: There she was, going to the subway decked out in high heels and a lovely dress, looking like a million dollars. A part of me wanted to run up to her and say, “I’ve just started writing about a character inspired by you.” No doubt she would have thought I was insane. I’ve never seen her again.

IBS: Well, the entire setting, I suppose. I mean, it’s very much here, in this part of Brooklyn, isn’t it? I’m thinking of the description of houses and streets. To me, they seem to come straight out of your own neighborhood.

One Sunday morning, I went into a crowded deli with the absurd name of La Bagel Delight. I was intending to ask for a cinnamon-raisin bagel, but the word caught in my mouth and came out as cinnamon-reagan. Without missing a beat, the young guy behind the counter answered, “Sorry, we don’t have any of those. How about a pumpernixon instead?” (5)

That really happened to her. Some of the restaurants are real places and others are invented. La Bagel Delight (believe it or not) is real.

IBS: What about the Hotel Existence? Harry’s Hotel Existence is a place for inventing new places, an elegant world of erotic fantasies, but it begins as “a refuge for lost children” (102). Is there an echo from Woburn House in In the Country of Last Things? After all, Dr. Woburn turned his house into a shelter for the sick and homeless, a place of refuge:

If he could not save thousands, he said, then perhaps he could save hundreds, and if he could not save hundreds, then perhaps he could save twenty or thirty. (In the Country of Last Things, 131)

PA: But Woburn House is a real place—real in the fiction, that is. The Hotel Existence in The Brooklyn Follies is a fantasy, a utopia—in the fiction. It’s your ideal world, your dream world. Everyone has one. Tom’s college paper on Thoreau’s Walden and the three pieces by Poe is important in this connection. The ideal landscape, the ideal house, the ideal room—which for both writers meant a place to think and work, an escape from American reality.

IBS: In The Brooklyn Follies it’s a place where children are rescued, among other things. It’s a place to be safe.

PA: It was the middle of World War II, and Harry was only ten years old. The hotel was inspired by stories he’d read about refugee children in Europe. But you’re right, the Hotel Existence always brings a sense of safety and protection. Or, in his adolescent fantasies, erotic excitement.

IBS: That’s true. Harry says, “It was a retreat, a world I could visit in my mind. That’s what we’re talking about, no? Escape” (102). “Every man has one,” he continues.

PA: Yes, “each man’s Hotel Existence is different from all the others” (105).

IBS: So, the question of course is whether you have your own “Hotel Existence”? Perhaps your books provide that kind of refuge?

PA: I’ve always found it interesting to think about perfect worlds, to look at flawed reality and imagine ways of improving it. I mean, what would you want the world to look like if you had the power to remake it? If nothing else, it’s an excellent question to ask if you want to know where someone stands politically. Please, sir, describe your perfect world to me.

PA: Yes. The man who lived down the road from us was always mowing his lawn. He and his wife had been planning to turn their house into a bed and breakfast, but then she died, quite suddenly, and the poor man mowed his lawn as a way of coping with his grief. He wasn’t old, maybe sixty, still vigorous, but he was lonely. We talked to him just a few times. He said he liked to go to Atlantic City to gamble. That was the big adventure of his life now—gambling. Then he would come back—and continue to mow his lawn. Thus was born the figure of Stanley Chowder.

IBS: You’ve returned to the Vermont countryside a few times in your work.⁵⁶ Nature, or the natural world, plays into the names you’ve chosen for the characters in The Brooklyn Follies: Wood, Flora, Aurora, Bright, Dunkel, Glass, Marina.

PA: Brightman-Dunkel is obvious. A reinvented self. An ex-jailbird’s stab at a new life.

PA: I don’t know. It was probably something in the air—or in the drinking water.

PA: Probably not. Although Nathan does make the joke, “We could start an architectural firm named Glass, Wood & Steel.”

IBS: As opposed to most of your other work, The Brooklyn Follies doesn’t challenge literary conventions.

PA: I deliberately wanted to write a more traditional narrative, and for the purposes of a comic novel, I think it’s better to be reasonably straightforward. There was a certain simplicity of tone that I wanted to establish with this book. Depending on the material, impulses find different ways of expressing themselves. In this story, the approach had to be blunt and straightforward, largely because the narrator, Nathan, is that kind of person. He’s not deeply reflective. He’s direct and at times fairly crude. The style of the book is a reflection of his character.

IBS: Your chapter headings are also a natural part of this particular narrative fabric, aren’t they? Some of them are really funny.

PA: I’ve always loved the chapter headings in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, and, yes, I hope they’re funny: “The Sperm Bank Surprise,” “Hawthorn Street or Hawthorne Street?,” “Riding North” (a reference, by the way, to John Donne’s poem “Riding Westward”). What else? I’m trying to remember. “Farewell to the Court.” That’s the title of a poem by Sir Walter Raleigh. “Our Girl, or Coke Is It.” “Coke Is It” was a line from a TV commercial back in the seventies or eighties. “A Knock on the Door,” “Monkey Business” . . .

PA: It did while I was writing it, but then, of course, I came home and read the newspaper [laughs].

IBS: And it’s not all comedy, as you said earlier. You weave in a substructure of references and allusions. Kafka’s story about the doll is prominent here, in fact, a key to the book, isn’t it?

By that point, of course, the girl no longer misses the doll. Kafka has given her something else instead, and by the time those three weeks are up, the letters have cured her of her unhappiness. She has the story, and when a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists. (155)

PA: The Kafka anecdote seems to be a true story, by the way. They tried to track down the little girl. Never found her. Which doesn’t diminish the power of the story, of course. It’s terribly moving.

PA: Because Tom’s head is crammed full with such things—an inexhaustible supply of useful and useless bits of junk and flotsam—because he’s a literary man through and through.

IBS: There’s a kind of discord between language and the body in The Brooklyn Follies. I mean, it’s as if kinetic movement is more eloquent than speech. For instance, when Lucy arrives and refuses to talk, Nathan realizes that he

should have known better than to count on language as a more efficient form of communication than nods and shakes of the head. (183–184)

IBS: The other day, we talked about The Book of Illusions, in which silence is an important generator of meaning. Here, silence becomes a form of sacrifice.

PA: I was thinking of the blind religious fanaticism that has become so prevalent in America these days. Rather than investigate an existing sect, I decided to make up my own. I thought it would be more interesting. Reverend Bob is forcing a brutal process of dispossession on his congregation—and the first thing to go is words.

PA: David means well, but his faith is unquestioning, and it leads him to commit acts of tremendous cruelty. But give him credit. In the end he backs off and lets Aurora divorce him.

PA: David is a lost soul, and he finds comfort in his devotion to Reverend Bob—who, of course, turns out to be a charlatan, an unholy holy man whose mind is set on fucking the beautiful Aurora.

IBS: Aurora is beautiful, indeed, and like the other central female characters in the novel, Lucy, Rachel, and Honey, she is also a complex character. Nancy, the B.P.M., less so, I think. She’s almost too good to be true, isn’t she?

PA: Not really. Beautiful, yes, but once Nathan meets her, he discovers that she’s rather stupid, a dim bulb of the New Age claptrap variety. Sweet and kind, but in other ways a disappointment.

IBS: Yes, she’s not very bright. Of course, we see her through Nathan’s perspective only.

IBS: Perhaps he’s not the most reliable of narrators. Take, for instance, his description of his own daughter, Rachel:

[M]uch like her mother before her, it’s a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes—all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom. (2)

PA: He’s unreasonably critical of her. Probably because he sees his ex-wife every time he looks at her, and he hates his ex-wife so much that he can’t even write her name anymore. For much of the book, he refers to her as “Name Deleted.” Fortunately, Nathan changes, and his reconciliation with Rachel is crucial to the outcome of the story.

IBS: Yes, it lifts the dark mood set in the opening line—“I was looking for a quiet place to die” (1)—and with the new connections he forms with the other female characters, his life improves considerably: Lucy, Aurora . . .

PA: And Joyce, let’s not forget Joyce. All those women. Tom gets his Honey, but Nathan is surrounded by women, and I think living in that female world is good for him.

IBS: We’ve touched upon the Christian religious dimension of The Brooklyn Follies, but there’s an interesting perspective also on Judaism—for instance, when Nathan explains his sense of Jewishness to Aurora’s extremist Christian husband:

All Jews are atheists, except for those who aren’t, of course. But I don’t have much to do with them. (251)

There’s a lot of humor here. “All Jews are atheists”? Where does that come from?

PA: I don’t know. Most Jews are atheists, aren’t they? Judaism, as far as I can tell, is the only Western religion you can belong to without having to believe in God.

IBS: This is precisely what some of the most interesting Jewish thinkers say: atheism can be part of being Jewish.

IBS: I do, and you are right, of course, that one of the major differences between Christianity and Judaism has to do with notions of the divine being. For the Jews the godhead is much more opaque. Here it’s infinity, it’s scripture . . .

IBS: As far as I know, even the most devout Jews cannot have any direct connection with the divine.

PA: That’s right, you can’t talk to God in the way born-again Christians can supposedly talk to Jesus.

IBS: For the Jew, the way to approach God, of course, is through scripture. Everything is in the Book. The Book is the door. Worship is exegesis: you must interpret, discuss, read between the lines. In fact, everything depends on how well we read. Isn’t that fascinating?

PA: Well, that’s the Jewish tradition, isn’t it? Lots of discussion, lots of disagreement, but very little certainty.