Quick Q&A with SUSAN CHOI

June 26, 2013 Civilian Reader Interview Fiction, My Education, Penguin, Penguin US, Short Books, Susan Choi

I’ve been trying to expand the coverage of the blog, into other genres and sub-genres of fiction. To this end, today I bring you a Q&A with author Susan Choi, author of My Education, organised by Penguin USA…

Your previous novels deal with high stakes: the Unabomber, kidnapping, wars overseas, terrorism. Did you find writing My Education, a story that deals with more typical problems of passion, ambition, and love, to be a different experience?

I did, in a good way. For all three of my previous books I did tons of research into Twentieth Century history, and politics, and ideology, and loved immersing myself in abstruse and challenging material, and then after finishing A Person of Interest, I had another baby (my second) and the very thought of research just made me pass out. I realized I wanted to write a book about people being young and falling in love and behaving stupidly, and that I probably didn’t need to do research for that. Now my kids are older and I’m getting sleep again at night and I’m back to doing abstruse research! But this book was a great change for me.

What was your inspiration for this novel?

Apart from wanting to avoid research, I was actually inspired in a very specific way by a book that I love, Allan Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty. I haven’t been more enthralled, and admiring, of a novel in I don’t know how long. And something about the way that book opens, with Nick in a bookstore thinking about a much older, more powerful man that he knows, and being so full of youthful moxie and naïveté, brought an opening scene, fully realized, into my mind. That’s happened to me a couple of times, and it’s thrilling: you know there’s a novel, and that you’ve found the entrance, but you have no idea what it contains.

You currently teach at Princeton University and both My Education and your last novel, A Person of Interest, feature professors as their protagonists, so it’s safe to assume you are well-versed in the culture of academia. How does your experience in the world of academia play out in your fiction?

I think I’m less well-versed in the culture of academia than poorly-versed in anything else. Esoteric worlds are hard to resist in fiction, and academia can be pretty esoteric. If I had more experience with the esoteric world of the CIA operative, or the mafia don, I’d definitely write about that. But, I am a professor’s daughter, and I guess that’s bequeathed a certain compulsion on my part to keep poking around in that region.

Motherhood impacts the relationship between Regina and Martha over the entire course of the novel; in the end, it seems to be one of the primary means through which they absolve the past. How have your own children affected your writing and your perception of the world?

Only totally. Parenthood has completely rewired me. Things that used to enthrall me now bore me, and things I never used to notice now obsess me, and that’s just one aspect of it. I think a lot, now, about children’s lives. Much of what happens to Regina in this book, to my mind, is that she realizes that children are people.

Being a love story, what kind of tropes of romance were you wary of? What did you hope to bring to the table with this novel?

I always saw this first as a story about being young. It is a love story, but the love story is a vehicle for exploring the youthful innocence, and selfishness, and unsustainable craziness of being a young person in love, and of being a young person in general. I think this novel is my way of coming to terms with my not being particularly young anymore.

For Regina, any contemplation of sexual identity seems to be on the backburner. Did you have any intentional reason for refraining from that sort of discussion?

Identity politics are very popular with Regina’s classmates, but they’re just not a part of her being. I’d be dragging the story into didactic territory, and maybe turning it into one of the dreary, insincere term papers Regina writes, if I had her sitting around contemplating her sexual identity, when everything about this situation is equally unfamiliar to her: Martha isn’t just a woman, she’s married, she’s a mother, she’s much older and more accomplished than Regina. For Regina the entire relationship is singular and unprecedented. She doesn’t think, “Oh, I’m a lesbian,” any more than she thinks, “Oh, I’m a home wrecker.” She’s just insanely in love – a condition that makes it hard for her to do much clear thinking at all.

What are a few of your favorite love triangles (or rather quadrangles, to be most accurate to My Education) in literature, TV, or film?

I think we’re talking about a love square consisting of two equilateral triangles sharing one side. I actually had to draw a picture just now, to figure this out. I can’t think of other examples of this particular geometry although I’m sure there must be some. I do love the triangle, as who doesn’t. Two of my favorite books of all time, The Great Gatsby and The Age of Innocence, feature famous triangles. I also love the sad and quiet triangle at the center of J.L. Carr’s magnificent short novel, A Month in the Country. The ménage, a different arrangement altogether, can be very endearing. I loved April Ludgate and her gay boyfriend and his gay boyfriend, on Parks and Recreation. I was sad when she dumped them, but they certainly deserved it.

What do you think of Chaucer and the body of literature Nicholas teaches? Was this of particular interest to you when you were a student, or did you do the research for the sake of this novel?

As of this writing, I know less about Chaucer than Regina did when Nicholas hired her as his teaching assistant. I just wanted a subject matter that felt as far as possible from the groovy poststructuralist stuff that Regina was studying.

Do you have anything else in the works or projects on the horizon?

I am back in the throes of a research obsession, but I don’t know where it will lead me, if anywhere. Once I spent a year researching pirates, and then I wrote American Woman, which takes place completely on land. So I will have to wait and see.

My Education is published by Penguin US on July 3rd 2013, and Short Books in the UK on July 4th.

“The 5th Wave” by Rick Yancey (Penguin)

June 10, 2013 Civilian Reader Uncategorized 5th Wave, Alien Incursion, Aliens, Dystopia, Invasion, Paranoia, Penguin, Penguin US, Rick Yancey, YA

A Sinister new YA Dystopia Series

After the 1st wave, only darkness remains. After the 2nd, only the lucky escape. And after the 3rd, only the unlucky survive. After the 4th wave, only one rule applies: trust no one.

Now, it’s the dawn of the 5th wave, and on a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs from Them. The beings who only look human, who roam the countryside killing anyone they see. Who have scattered Earth’s last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive, Cassie believes, until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan Walker may be Cassie’s only hope for rescuing her brother – or even saving herself. But Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up.

There is a lot to like about this novel. The world-building is interesting, the characters are (for the most part) well-defined and well-written. The story is focused, giving it a quick-pace and addictive momentum. I really enjoyed reading this, despite one major niggle around the middle. Certainly, it’s easy to see why people have been talking about the series, and why Penguin think they are on to a winner. Among the better YA dystopia series, certainly.

The opening chapters offer one of the best introductions to a dystopian future I have read in a long while. We get a great sense of the environment in which Cassie, the first protagonist we follow, is operating and trying to survive. We also learn what the waves of alien attacks have done to the survivors, both physically (billions dead) and mentally (this is now paranoia city…).

“If you can’t trust anyone, then you can trust no one. Better to take the chance that Aunty Tilly is one of them than play the odds that you’ve stumbled across a fellow survivor. That’s friggin’ diabolical. It tears us apart. It makes us that much easier to hunt down and eradicate. The 4th Wave forces us into solitude, where there’s no strength in numbers, where we slowly go crazy from the isolation and fear and terrible anticipation of the inevitable… This is what the Others have done to us. You can’t band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope. How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.”

And so, survivors “put on a human face so no human face can be trusted. The only answer: Kill everyone or risk being killed by anyone.”

Most importantly, we get to know Cassie very quickly. Within about 5% of the novel (yes, read this on my Kindle), I felt I knew her pretty well, and certainly felt myself rooting for her. She is a bit true-to-type and is probably exactly what you expect from a YA heroine/hero, sure, but Yancey writes her well. She is a good guide, with an engaging, inviting voice. However, and this is my greatest issue with the book, this state of affairs did not last. I found Cassie’s character changed completely once she met Evan. She went from being hyper-self-sufficient to, effectively, totally-dependent (paranoid still, but dependent nonetheless). This weakened her. Though, she’s also not blind to the strangeness of her situation…

“Somehow the fact that I was rescued by a very good-looking guy with a lopsided grin and large, strong hands is the most unnerving thing that has happened to me since the Others arrived.”

Her interest in Evan, while sometimes a bit over-the-top, is also quite well done, reflecting the conflicted, bumbling, hormone-influenced confusion when it comes to people teenagers develop crushes on:

“What?” Smiling that damned lopsided, sexy grin, shoulders up, hands stuffed deep in his pockets with a sort of aw-shucks attitude, which I guess is meant to drive me the good kind of crazy. What is it about him that makes me want to slap him and kiss him, run from him and to him, throw my arms around him and knee him in the balls, all at the same time? I’d like to blame the Arrival for the effect he has on me, but something tells me guys have been doing this to us for a lot longer than a few months.

All of the other protagonists go through pretty realistic evolutions. The army has been collecting surviving teens and children, transporting them to the training facility, leaving adults behind for… clean-up. The militarisation of the young is troubling, certainly, but it is addressed through the eyes of some of those recruits. (A lot of YA novels seem to promote weapons-skills…) Our second main perspective is presented through Ben, who comes to be known as “Zombie” at the training camp. He develops into a more interesting character than Cassie, by the end of the book. All of his comrades are varied characters, and interesting to read about, too – certainly Ringer, who I enjoyed: she’s clearly a little mad, closed off (maybe edging towards sociopathic, actually). Sammy, whose call-sign is “Nugget”, was another good character, so very young and yet thrust into such horrific situations, brutal training, and a grueling environment.

Some of the early chapters with Evan felt a little muddled. As did some attempts to create uncertainty in the reader – there were at least two scenes that felt like attempts to make us question what we knew, when we’d already been doing that, and throwing these in ruined the tension and were obvious, and just a little artless. Minor niggles, I suppose, but they were clear. On the whole, though, Yancey’s prose is tight and well-crafted. It’s nothing spectacular, but he has a clear style, and one that pulls the reader on through the story.

Overall, though, Yancey has created a sinister, atmospheric and gripping alien-invasion-dystopia. The Waves are well-conceived, with the eponymous wave utterly devious.

The 5th Wave is flawed, but it’s gripping and well-executed. I definitely recommend it, and can’t wait for the next book in the series.

An Interview with DEBORAH HARKNESS

May 29, 2013 Civilian Reader Interview A Discovery of Witches, Deborah Harkness, Fiction, Headline, Penguin US, Shadow of Night, Urban Fantasy, Vampires, Warner Bros, Witches

Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches and it’s sequel, Shadow of Night, seem to have taken readers by storm (the former debuted on the New York Times Bestseller list at #2). The series features a mysterious, magical text, vampires and witches. It actually sounds pretty intriguing, and I should really get around to reading it at some point. (Emma already reviewed the first novel for CR, in February 2011.)

In celebration of the paperback release for the second novel (of three, in the All Souls trilogy), Harkness’s US publisher organised a Q&A. Below are some of her answers.

NB: I have tweaked the wording of the questions, but none of the author’s answers were changed, altered or truncated.

A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES, the first book in your series, begins with Diana Bishop stumbling across a lost, enchanted manuscript called “Ashmole 782”, in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Your protagonists, Diana Bishop and Matthew Clairmont, are still trying to uncover its secrets in SHADOW OF NIGHT. You had a similar experience while you were completing your dissertation. What’s the story behind your real-life discovery, and how did it inspire the creation of these novels?

I did discover a manuscript – not an enchanted one, alas – in the Bodleian Library. It was a manuscript owned by Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer, the mathematician and alchemist John Dee. In the 1570s and 1580s he became interested in using a crystal ball to talk to angels. The angels gave him all kinds of instructions on how to manage his life at home, his work—they even told him to pack up his family and belongings and go to far-away Poland and Prague. In the conversations, Dee asked the angels about a mysterious book in his library called “the Book of Soyga” or “Aldaraia.” No one had ever been able to find it, even though many of Dee’s other books survive in libraries throughout the world. In the summer of 1994 I was spending time in Oxford between finishing my doctorate and starting my first job. It was a wonderfully creative time, since I had no deadlines to worry about and my dissertation on Dee’s angel conversations was complete. As with most discoveries, this discovery of a “lost” manuscript was entirely accidental. I was looking for something else in the Bodleian’s catalogue and in the upper corner of the page was a reference to a book called “Aldaraia.” I knew it couldn’t be Dee’s book, but I called it up anyway. And it turned out it WAS the book (or at least a copy of it). With the help of the Bodleian’s Keeper of Rare Books, I located another copy in the British Library.

Are there other lost books like this in the world?

Absolutely! Entire books have been written about famous lost volumes – including works by Plato, Aristotle, and Shakespeare to name just a few. Libraries are full of such treasures, some of them unrecognized and others simply misfiled or mislabeled. And we find lost books outside of libraries, too. In January 2006, a completely unknown manuscript belonging to one of the 17th century’s most prominent scientists, Robert Hooke, was discovered when someone was having the contents of their house valued for auction. The manuscript included minutes of early Royal Society meetings that we presumed were lost forever.

SHADOW OF NIGHT opens on a scene in 1590s Elizabethan England featuring the famous School of Night, a group of historical figures believed to be friends, including Sir Walter Raleigh and playwright Christopher Marlowe. Why did you choose to feature these individuals, and can we expect Diana and Matthew to meet other famous figures from the past?

I wrote my master’s thesis on the imagery surrounding Elizabeth I during the last two decades of her reign. One of my main sources was the poem “The Shadow of Night” by George Chapman – a member of this circle of fascinating men – and that work is dedicated to a mysterious poet named Matthew Roydon about whom we know very little. When I was first thinking about how vampires moved in the world (and this was way back in the autumn of 2008 when I was just beginning A Discovery of Witches) I remembered Roydon and thought “that is the kind of identity a vampire would have, surrounded by interesting people but not the center of the action.” From that moment on I knew the second part of Diana and Matthew’s story would take place among the School of Night. And from a character standpoint, Walter Raleigh, Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, and the other men associated with the group are irresistible. They were such significant, colorful presences in Elizabethan England.

In SHADOW OF NIGHT, we learn more about the alchemical bonds between Diana and Matthew. In your day job, you are a professor of history and science at the University of Southern California and have focused on alchemy in your research. What aspects of this intersection between science and magic do you hope readers will pick up on while reading SHADOW OF NIGHT?

Whereas A Discovery of Witches focused on the literature and symbolism of alchemy, in Shadow of Night I’m able to explore some of the hands-on aspects of this ancient tradition. There is still plenty of symbolism for Diana to think about, but in this volume we go from abstractions and ideals to real transformation and change – which was always my intention with the series. Just as we get to know more about how Elizabethan men and women undertook alchemical experiments, we also get to see Matthew and Diana’s relationship undergo the metamorphosis from new love to something more.

Did you have an idea or an outline for SHADOW OF NIGHT when you were writing A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES? Did the direction change once you sat down to write it?

I didn’t outline either book in the traditional sense. In both cases I knew what some of the high points were and how the plot moved towards the conclusion, but there were some significant changes during the revision process. This was especially true for Shadow Of Night, although most of those changes involved moving specific pieces of the plot forward or back to improve the momentum and flow.

The events in SHADOW OF NIGHT span the globe, with London, France, and Prague as some of the locales. Did you travel to these destinations for your research?

I did. My historical research has been based in London for some time now, so I’ve spent long stretches of time living in the City of London – the oldest part of the metropolis – but I had never been to the Auvergne or Prague. I visited both places while writing the book, and in both cases it was a bit like traveling in time to walk village lanes, old pilgrim roads, and twisting city streets while imagining Diana and Matthew at my side.

It’s perhaps lazy to refer to Twilight, given the inclusion of vampires in your novels. But, unlike Stephanie Meyer’s leading couple, Bella and Edward (who meet in the halls of a high school and, from my limited exposure to the movies, seem entirely controlled by their rampant hormones), your main characters Matthew and Diana are established academics who meet in the library of one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Your vampires and witches drink wine together, practice yoga, and discuss philosophy. Did you conceive of these characters because of something you thought missing in the fantasy genre?

There are a lot of adults reading young adult books, and for good reason. Authors who specialize in the young adult market are writing original, compelling stories that can make even the most cynical grownups believe in magic. In writing A Discovery Of Witches, I wanted to give adult readers a world no less magical, no less surprising and delightful, but one that included grown-up concerns and activities. These are not your children’s vampires and witches.

A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES was a huge success, and has now been published in 37 countries. What’s your reaction to the novel’s success? Was it surprising how taken fans were with the novel?

It has been amazing – and a bit overwhelming. I was surprised by how quickly readers embraced two central characters who challenge our typical notion of what a heroine or hero should be. And I continue to be amazed whenever a new reader pops up, whether one in the US or somewhere like Finland or Japan – to tell me how much they enjoyed being caught up in Diana’s world.

Last summer, Warner Brothers acquired the movie rights to the All Souls trilogy (Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer David Auburn has been tapped to pen the screenplay). Are you looking forward to your novels being portrayed on the big screen? Any casting ideas, from family, friends or fans that have caught your fancy?

I was thrilled when Warner Brothers wanted to translate the All Souls trilogy from book to screen. At first I was reluctant about the whole idea of a movie, and it actually took me nearly two years to agree to let someone try. The team at Warner Brothers impressed me with their seriousness about the project and their commitment to the characters and story I was trying to tell. Their decision to go with David Auburn confirmed that my faith in them was not misplaced. As for the casting, I deliberately don’t say anything about that! I would hate for any actor or actress to be cast in one of these roles and feel that they didn’t have my total support. I will say, however, that many of my readers’ ideas involve actors who have already played a vampire and I would be very surprised if one of them were asked to be Matthew!

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Fans of the novels can also join Deborah Harkness and her editor Carole DeSanti, the author of The Unruly Passions of Eugénie R, for a virtual book event on BookTalk Nation on June 4^th at 2pm EST. You can join by phone and buy personalized copies of the book by ordering online here. For more about Harkness’s All Souls trilogy, be sure to check out her website.

A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night are published by Penguin in the US and Headline in the UK.