Robert and Rae Levin House

Transcription

>>From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. [ Silence ] >>Ned Marcelle: My name is Ned Marcelle. I'm the Editor of the Style section of the Washington Post and the Post is proud to be a charter sponsor of the festival, and every year, Maria Arono, who helps organize the whole affair, chooses one of us from the Post, and a writer, and it's like this big yenta of matchmaking us, and I always figure out what's the connection that she saw, and sure enough, in Julia's biography, it's clear that she's, she spent a lot of time in magazines, like I did in New York, and she worked in the copy department. And, as an editor at a magazine, I know that the Copy Editor's respect standards in this unique way and perfects sentences for all these writers who are far-flung and put together this package. And, they have a sort of interior life that is always well known in the office, but they don't quite share readily, so it makes perfect sense that in 2002, when Julia's Three Junes came out, it emerged as a fully-formed novel, her first, and won the National Book Award, and lead to an amazing literary career that we're still enjoying, and welcoming new readers to it every year, as this year, with her publication of Widower Tale. So, without hesitation, I invite you to welcome with me Julia Glass. [ Clapping ] >>Julia Glass: Wow, this, I, this is my third time coming to this festival, and every time the turnout is bigger and bigger and it's so gratifying, and I'm just going to assume that there's no doubt in your mind that I might actually be Ken Follett. [Laughter] Okay. I also want to say that it should have been obvious to Ken that, to Ned, that the reason that he was picked to introduce me is that we're both so stylish. Wow, you know, this is obvious to you I'm sure, but we writers are readers too, and one of the things that's so fun about this event is that we get to meet and listen to some of our favorite writers as well. I got to listen to Susan Collins this morning, my son and I are, you know, who isn't big fans of the Hunger Gang series, and this morning at breakfast, Rosemary Wells came up to me and wanted to meet me, and I was just like, "Oh my God the Buddy Planet", and, you know, I've read her books so many, many, many, many times to both of my sons when they were small. So we, we are thrilled to be here with other writers, but mostly to see that there's still so many readers in the world. Well, I'm a little cross-eyed because I'm actually smack in the middle of a book tour for my brand new novel, came out two weeks ago called the Widower's Tale, and I can tell you, thank you, that the number one question I'm getting from early readers is this one, where in the world did I come up with my lasted protagonist, this cranky, eloquent, vital, veral, romantic, snobbish, mildly chauvinistic, politically irreverent, retired male librarian, and he's not based on Dr. Belington. Anyway, that is the kind of question that I most like hearing, because every story, I create, begins with a single character. If you, the reader, can't fully enter the mind and soul of my protagonist, you don't have to like them necessarily; at least not to begin with, you're not going to like my book. And, when I get a bad review, I can always tell it's because the reviewer just couldn't stand my character. Often the characters personality comes in to focus first. That was the case with Fenno McLeod, in my first novel, Three Junes, a good heart and a clean mind, shrouded by fear and emotional inhibition. True, also, with Greenie Duquette, the pastry chef who takes center stage in my second novel, The Whole World Over. I wanted to write about a woman whose confidence and gusto for life defined her weaknesses as well as her strengths. And, sometimes a character comes to me with a predicament more than a personality. As the novelist John Ducrane likes to say, "Fiction, it's only about trouble. Without trouble, you've got no tension, no suspense, and in fact, no story. Trouble may come from inside the character, the urge to go to sea, a disturbing childhood memory, or even a disease. Or trouble might come from outside the character, the child she gave up for adoption tracks her down, her country goes to war, a tree branch severed in a violent storm falls on her head. Or the character might make a choice that begets the trouble, have an affair, buys a house, quits a job. But trouble it the one thing we can always count on. In fact, I've always said that fiction writers have to be part sadist, because it's our job to inflict a lot of pain on the people we create. But, sometimes I think of a novel's plot as nothing more or less complicated than an obstacle course, a decathlon requiring a variety of feats, some practical, some spiritual. In a Julia Glass novel, you make sure that a number of feats will be familial. The lucky individual who gets to run this course, it's always my first and most important character, who will come to me unexpectedly, when I'm mindlessly rolling along in my everyday groove, showering, shopping, driving, cooking, getting the kids to school, the garbage on the street, the groceries in the fridge. From that character sprouts other characters, parents, children, colleagues, neighbors and even pets. The story of this one individual grows the way a sapling becomes a tree, the trunk widens, the bark thickens, limbs proliferate bearing leaves and flowers and then fruit, squirrels and birds move in, the occasional cat prowls through in search of a meal. Each of my novels, by the time I'm finished, feels like a complete and self-sustaining cosmos, that I never forget the seed, that one character who seeped into my consciousness. I may even remember precisely when it happened. Percival Darling, the eponymous hero of The Widowers Tale, I have to say I love that word eponymous, it sounds like a creature from Greek Mythology like a cross between and elephant and a Shetland pony or something, I love that word eponymous. So, Percival Darling came to me on a late winter's night in January 2005. After 24 years of living in New York City, a fellowship had lured me north, along with my family to my native Massachusetts. My parents were still living in the house where I lived from age 9 through all of my college summers, and I decided to rent another house nearby. By happenstance, it was the former home of my best friend from junior high school. Its rooms and scrolling lawns, familiar to me in a general way, but now, three decades and many occupants later, completely strange. So, there was a very surreal quality to this move. So, there I was, after more than a quarter century's residence elsewhere, living again in my childhood town, a place that's astonishingly rural, for a community just half and hour's drive from Boston, where houses, both historic and modern, are sheltered by thick woods or command sweeping views of pastures and placid ponds. When I was young, it was home to a lot of what I called barefoot intellectuals, absent-minded, Ivy League professors, modernist architects, quazee-hippie lawyers and doctors married to trust-fund origami artists. [Laughter] Years later, through my frequent but brief holiday visits, the town had [inaudible] reassuringly unchanged. So, I was aware that the real estate prices had soared and if I looked closely, I noticed how many of the rustic crooked edges on the landscape had been straightened, how the catena of things, once left to the anarchy of time and weather, had been scrubbed and polished. A few fine but unpretentious houses appeared to have sprouted stone pillars at the entrance to their long driveways, and the Victorian town library, where I'd spent hours as an underpaid Paige, a building both stately and frumpy, had received a [inaudible] makeover from a renowned architect. Tumbled stone walls had been disciplined. Trees that once formed shaggy tunnels above the roads had been tamed. Some of those roads, once narrow and chaotically potholed, were wider and smoother now. But, not until I lived there full-time as an adult shopping and picking up my mail at the quaintly antique post office, as a parent with children in the local schools, did I see how much more had changed. The social zeitgeist of the town, due to its pumped up wealth, seemed to have become simultaneously more liberal and more conservative. The politically correct idealism of raw milk cooperatives, hot yoga classes, and composting workshops, in direct contradiction to four thousand square foot house, and gas guzzling SUV's, taking my children to birthday parties, I discovered, deep in the woods, new developments of houses, that looked like country clubs. Complete with in-ground sprinkler systems and video surveillance cameras, with signs on the lawn reading, "Saved Our Four". [Laughter] These people clearly wanted to have their cake and save the planet too. No longer did local teens shovel snow or plant grass. Instead, platoons of Hispanic, of Hispanic workers shuttled back and forth on flatbed trucks, with squadrons of lawn equipment. Some of the changes I saw were simply a sign of the times, but some of them felt like a sign of a decadence portending a fall. Here's something that particularly amused and annoyed me. The abundant wildlife, attracted to the ample woods and swamps, which back in my childhood was taken for granted as something to celebrate, had become, to many new residence, pure nuisance. The deer that dependably ate all the tulips, if you were foolish enough to plant tulips, the raccoons that would raid your garbage cans, the barn swallows, that having set up house in an open shed, would dive bomb your dog and your car and your children, once their fledglings were hatched, the fisher cats that would snatch any house cats left out after dark. A new neighbor of my parents that complained that wild turkeys enjoying the warm tarmac in front of her garage, were constantly preventing her from parking. And, at one town meeting while I was there, dog owner lobbied to have horses barred from the towns miles of conservation trails. What if the horses stepped on their dogs or what if, heaven forbid, their dogs should eat the manure? I began to feel vaguely offended, as if I owned the town, as if its citizens had any obligation to preserve the place as I had known it, my personal snow globe of lazy days reading in unkempt hayfields, surrounded by Joanie Mitchell songs, rotary lawn mowers, rusted Volvo's, the reassuring, self-righteousness of Eugene McCarthy era outrage, that typified the views of most of the residence back then, except, I might add, for my parents, the token old world Republicans who's contrarian views kept me thoroughly and appropriately embarrassed throughout my teens. But, when I was eleven or so, in the late 1960's, a perfectly stenciled peace sign, two-stories high, appeared on the side of a barn. So, there I was, having lived in the is familiar, yet disturbingly different town for five months, when a spectacular blizzard hit. It snowed for a day and a night and most of another day. That second night, after my boys were in bed, I bundled up and went for a walk down a long wooded lane, now a tunnel of waited bows and tall banks of snow, made blue by the darkness. Deep in the woods to either side, the houses glowed. Here, I thought, was the town I knew. Its new fangled glossiness erased by the elements. Yet, if I looked closely through the window, I could see the ostentatious prosperity that stood for everything I had become to despise. I recognized myself, not for the first time, by the way, as a premature kremudgin [phonetic], not yet 50, railing against a kind of change that is, at least on the surface, harmless, selfish and myopic perhaps, but in the global scheme of things, fairly benign. I stood still in the middle of the road, glaring into a blindly well-lit, far too large, granite appointed kitchen, and I imagined a cantankerous, fossilized old-timer, a man who can no longer tolerate how fast the world is changing around him, mostly because its leaving him behind. And, I knew that in this man, an alter ego of my least tolerant, least adaptable self, I'd found the genesis of my next novel. Why a man, not a woman, I can't say, though maybe the gender switch was a way of holding this part of myself at arm's length. I began to think a lot about the nature of change. Whether its technological, intellectual, or aesthetic, what it gives us, what it wipes out, the risk and dangers that always come with its privileges and luxuries. I thought, too, about the subtle evolution that takes place when our youthful selves, who earn for change, who can't find or make change fast enough, turn a corner and begin to fear it. When does progress begin to resemble entropy, a threat to civilization as we know it. Eventually, this chain of daydreaming lead me to conceive of the novels second most important characters, Percy's grandson Robert, a 20 year old, pre-med student, who becomes involved with a group of bold, but naive environmental activists. Within days of dreaming up Percy, the title of the novel came to me as well. I'd call it, Everything Must Change. In the end, I changed my mind about that, but never about Percy. The tree that night, on that road, in my beloved but irreversibly altered hometown, had begun to grow. And now, I want to say a little bit about fiction in general and the heroes that fiction contains. Rumors about the death of fiction, the end of the novel have become so common that they're tiresome. But, it's true that one day we could wake up and find that nobody we know bothers to pick up stories anymore, or even download the onto a screen. I actually have a friend that told me that he read Ana Karina in two different translations on his iPhone this past summer, blew my mind. I think one of those Russian names would take up the entire screen. [Laughter] Maybe we'll feel a vague nostalgia for novels and short stories and for poetry too, the way you might feel nostalgic for cars of the 1950's or drive-in theatres, or Polaroid camera's, or as writers sometimes do, for typewriters. Do you remember the bell that would ring every time you reach the right hand margin? The swoosh of the carriage return? But, unlike carriage returns, novels and stories are irreplaceable. Nothing we know in our culture, with the possible exception of very good movies, which, as we know, are increasingly rare, can possibly fulfill what novels and short stories do. Fiction reminds me of the space program, an opportunity for noble exploration that many people now view as frivolous or irrelevant, yet, if we put an end to it, we may lose, forever, the chance to glimpse distant realms filled with revelations that we can't begin to guess at. A friend of mine recently shared with me a graduation speech, that was given by Alexis Mobahill, and English teacher at a private high school in Berkley California, addressing a group of people on the cusp of adulthood, she told them why they must keep reading books, fiction in particular, and I'm going to quote from this. "We are living through an age that feels, at times, like a constantly rebooting emergency. Things are dire and then oil spills and earthquakes happen, pushing us into a new, more horrifying sense of dire. Was it always this way? I'm not sure. Maybe this is a new awful, or maybe it isn't, but I know, for sure, that as you move through your life, our world will call to you, will require time and effort and compassion and ingenuity from you. Some of you will go to work for doctors without borders, and some of you will work on climate change issues, and some of you will become lawyers, who help people in need fight a system that seems set against them. Some of you will raise children, or teach, or paint, or own a shop, and that will be the way you position yourself between vulnerability and chaos. No matter what you do with your life and your talents, however, you will need to cultivate compassion, to open yourselves to people who need you, even if they are all the way across this great wide world. To be a citizen of this world, with any chance of being productive, or at least maintaining your sanity, you will need to practice, empathy and intellectual imagination. The reading of literature will help you with this, because it speaks straight to the heart of your life, and to the lives of everyone else around you. Reading is an opportunity for the purest possible compassion, a chance to channel another life, another place, another time, another soul. A novel is like a portable church, an opportunity for passion, and compassion, for community, for communion, confession, reflection, redemption, elevation, revelation. Novels are centers of feeling of a nerve, they are performers of our highest humanity. You will need this opportunity to practice the way the world will be." In closing, I'd like to read you part of an email I received from a friend of mine, who read my new novel, a man in his 30's. Dear Julie, You've written another marvelous book with the coolest 70 year old I have ever encountered in fiction. He skinny-dips, he flirts, he flirts when shopping for bathing suits, he is indifferent to the charm of toddlers. His story, his tale, shows life as funny, tragic, confounding, joyful, regretful, hopeful, ordinary, and even magical. In other words, life as it really is. Percy is my hero, and if he were gay and I were single, I would be asking you for his phone number. That's the great, when somebody wants a phone number for an email for your characters. By the end of the book, I marveled at how many people his special combo of archness and warmth had touched. I can see Percy now, swimming across the harbor in the September sun. I know that despite his recent trials, he swims with some sense of satisfaction that he's done his best. I can only hope that I'll be doing something similar at 71. I said earlier in this talk, that what I always hope is that you, the reader, will be able to fully enter my characters, but really, it's the other way around. What I want is for my characters to fully enter you. When the heroes I create become heroes to my readers, I know I've done my job. I've enlarged my readers vision of themselves, magnified the way they seem themselves in a world that is as fragile and tender as it can be brutal and frightening, inspired them to leap their own hurdles, and live as gracefully as they possibly can, with whatever changes come their way. Thank you. [ Clapping ] So, I think I have time for a few questions, if anybody has any questions at all, about any of my books. >>Actually, I haven't read any of your books, but I might. >>Julia: You're here for Ken Follett, aren't you. You're just holding a place, I knew it. It's okay. >>But, as a participant in this National Book Festival, how do you feel about the electronic readers? >>Julia: How do I fell about the e-readers? You know, I used to feel hostile toward them, as I have felt hostile toward every technological advance, until I had to get it into my life. This is what I think about them. I think that any, any medium that makes it easier for people to read stories is welcome. My only objection is the price point that's been set up by some of the merchants, namely Amazon, and, the issues that authors and agents are trying to work out with publisher. I mean, the truth is, we make a lot less money when you download a book than if you buy it, but you know what, it's great, I mean, I have to tell you I was hugely amused by this friend reading Ana Karina, he downloaded two different translations and he'd go back and forth, and I just thought, okay, if that's the future of reading literature, then let's go with it. >>Thank you. >>Julia: Yes. >>Hi, its, I enjoyed so much the first two books and the character Fenno and I wondered where that came about and is there a Fenno in the third novel? >>Julia: Well, as I, as I said earlier, Fenno McLeod, the hero of Three Junes, and as, I think he also is in the Whole World Over, really came out of a corner of me. He's sort of, he's a part of me that was a very emotionally, cautious, fearsome person. I'm not quite that person anymore, though I have tendencies that way, and I wanted to sort of write a cautionary tale for myself in some ways. But, he's also the case of character that I never dreamed would become as big as he did in the book. I thought it was going to be really the story of his father, and I really fell in love with him, and, and he's a character I may not be done with. I don't know. I don't mean to be coy, but I'm thinking about him a lot. Yes. >>Thank you for being the warm up for Mr. Follett, I think you've done a great job. [Clapping and Laughing] >>Julia: Thanks. >>And, first, I wanted to congratulate you for apparently writing a book about a male, who is multi- dimensional, who's not perfect, but who has some positive characteristics and traits. Given that, an earlier author this morning seemed to have a very strong dislike of men in general, as she made several comments that were not very positive about men. But, my question to you has to do with process and what you need as an author. And would your satisfaction about writing your novel be as complete, if there were no readers? >>Julia: Wow, you started out talking about my writing men, and then you're, are you asking me two questions, or you just wanted to comment on the male? >>No, I just commented on that, but I wanted to ask you, from your perspective as an author. >>Julia: What would it be like to have, to know that I was writing for no readers? >>No, it's exactly, as a writer, is it necessary, and I think you were alluding to it a little bit towards the end of your presentation, is it necessary for a writer to have readers for the novel to be truly complete? >>Julia: Okay. Oh, well, is it necessary for the novel to be truly complete, maybe not, but I will say this, the most, people ask me, you know, what was the most surprising thing to happen to you, when you had your first novel come out. It might be winning the National Book Award, that's true, but I will tell you that when I started to meet total strangers who'd invested their precious time in reading my books and wanted to meet me and talk to me about it, blew my mind, and I have to say readers are my number one addiction, so I'd go through terrible withdrawal if I lost readers. I've got to know I have them. But, you know, writing that first novel without a contract, without, you know, just in a cave, was a very different experience, that sometimes I wish I could recapture a little, because sometimes I have to stop myself and not think too much about, about what I know about people who've read my books, what they expect, you know, what they hope for. It's important to keep, to keep a little at arm's length when you write, but I don't know what it would be like to write my books without readers, at this point. It is, I think it is important actually. >>Thank you. >>Julia: Yeah. >>Hello. >>Julia: Hi. >>Your speech was amazing. You sort of answered my question partially, I just wondered what your inspiration for Three Junes was? >>Julia: My inspiration for Three Junes, well, you know, every book is a sum of so many life experience. You know, Three Junes grew out of a time in my life that I've often talked about, I think I talked about it here the first time I came, I had a really rotten mid-thirties. I lost my only sibling to suicide, I was diagnosed with cancer, and I went through a divorce, and you know, it was a terrifying, demoralizing time in my life, and that's when I started writing Three Junes, but I didn't know, until after it came out, and people started to talk about it, that it really is a book about enduring the kind of heartbreak, regret and emotional fear that you think you're never going to get through. You know, and really, it's true that all the novels that I love the best, are about nothing more than human endurance and also our ability to rise above our own folly. I'm always interested by how, and I know this from my own life, how do really really smart, good hearted people make such stupid mistakes, and then live with the consequences of those mistakes, and live through them and beyond them, and I know that's what Three Junes came out of, but I didn't know it at the time. >>Thank you. >>Julia: Thank you. So, anymore questions? Well, I'm going to move over for Ken. Thank you. [ Clapping ] >>This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.