THE LITBLOG CO-OP

LBC Podcast #1: Valerie Trueblood

Nominator: Anne Fernald

Nominee: Valerie Trueblood

Subjects Discussed: Weaknesses for beautiful books, life as "structured anarchy," the definition of plot, David Markson, narrative flow, cause and effect in narrative, unexpected events, Seven Loves' "eventless" perception, on being "anti-plot," the beginnings of May Nilsson, family characteristics, the relationship between unpredictable life and fiction, compartmentalized American novels vs. compartmentalized British novels, Edward P. Jones, MFA workshops, the short story form, the paucity of older protagonists in fiction and how older people are underestimated, Faulkner and race, Sidney Thompson, verboeten perspectives, underlying nuances beneath sentences, Trueblood's unintentional wisdom, two-inch items in newspapers, "quiet" vs. melodramtic reader perceptions, people who disappear, and being an apocalyptic person.

Backup Link: (MP3)

(A co-production of the LBC, Pinky's Paperhaus and The Bat Segundo Show)

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Trueblood: Narrative seems to me to be something that sort of flows in many currents through us and carries us through life, but is not -- I guess what I mean by plot and why I'm sort of anti-plot is the sort of contained arc: the beginning, the complication and the resolution.  Novels like that, I just don't believe.  It's hard for me to see that things could really ever be tied up with a resolution. 

Chronology and History, Memory and Time

Valerie's thoughts on chronology below lead easily toward the elements of the novel that so captured my own attention -- the extraordinary way in which history is interwoven into the book.  It's rare that a novel captures for me the feeling of what it is to be alive at particular moments in the past, because any writer who aspires to portray such a thing gets caught between various bad options: should the characters encounter the most famous people of their time (even though most of us never have much interaction with the names that will last in the history books) because that is a simple way to signal that this is History? should the characters point out major events? how much emphasis should be put on details different from our own lives now?  Et cetera.

These are the questions of a historical novel, which is generally seen as something different from a novel that just happens to be set in the past -- the emphasis is different.  A setting in the past is not necessarily about the past.  And yet, for me at least, Seven Loves is not quite either, or almost both, and better because of it.  The book accomplishes this feat by indirection, and the effect is a result of both the non-chronological form and the weight and power given to memory in the narrative.

First, we have the personal events of May's life, the stuff of everyday existence, the family stories, the individual experiences.  As early as the second chapter, the patterns created through May's remembering create a vivid portrayal of her life as imagined by the writer.  The novel accumulates these details as it progresses -- things hinted at or passed by earlier get filled out, explained, explored, and whatever details the reader has kept in her or his mind then gain new resonance.  This is a useful technique for building a sense of "roundness" for a character, but it is more than that -- it deepens the entire world of the narrative, creating perspective and richness.

What most impresses me about Seven Loves, though, is that it doesn't stop there.  Many a sensitive, well-written novel creates perspective and offers deeply imagined characters, but what sets Seven Loves apart for me is the way it subtly situates those deeply imagined characters within a clear, but never obtrusive, past.  From the Depression and World War II to Vietnam and all its aftermaths, nearly a century of American life gets glimpsed in the book.  Always, though, the glimpses are just that, and the relationships of friends and family, colleagues and students, supervisors and enforcers, loves and losses are more immediate, though not all-consuming.  The personal and political intersect, encountering each other, affecting each other, and yet they are different worlds, different effects.  The personal becomes the sharper instrument of memory, and the form of the novel reflects this, but the world beyond the home and family, beyond love and loss, remains a sharp shadow across it all.

A more linear narrative approach, perhaps one that didn't foreground the play of memory so much, would not have been able to achieve such a fine balance of experience and events, because it would have robbed us of the many glimpses that create -- through repetition, accumulation, and slow revelation -- the substance that is then given another layer of meaning through the mention of moments we think of as history.  The novel becomes much more than a simple portayal of one woman's life.  It becomes the portrayal of a life lived in time, a life with a past built from the material we all build our pasts from: what we remember.  It thus manages to be intimate without being hermetic, focused without being solipsistic, personal without forgetting how much lies beyond each one of us.

Valerie Trueblood Interview

Anne Fernald: First of all, thank you so much for agreeing to another interview! I hope this is fun and not too odious. And most of all, thanks for your novel, Seven Loves. You sent it to me out of the blue and, as you intuited, it was just my thing.

Valerie Trueblood: I did send it to you out of the blue! And you put your hand up and caught it. I had been reading your blog with such interest; I knew you loved Woolf and so were probably open to work that had to do with time and the slow (or in Amy Hempel's inspired word, "slown") onslaught of existence rather than with plot as such, and I suddenly thought, "I want this person to see my book." I thought "see." I didn't think "read." It was hard to imagine anyone actually sitting reading it; it still is. So thank you! And then to my surprise and delight you nominated it.

AF: I read in an online interview that it was a friend who told you that you had written about the same character, but at two different ages. Is true? How did you go from those two stories to the novel?

VT: Yes, a friend sort of seized me and said, "Write this out." It was Denise Levertov. In the last years of her life she moved to Seattle and through various twists of fate we became friends. Actually I bought her at a peace group auction! She offered a master class for a poet, and I bought it and gave it to a poet friend. Eventually I met her too and that turned into one of the great friendships of my life. Anyway she liked to order people around and she felt there was more where those two pieces came from. And there was. I just kept going.

AF: I love the structure. But it's a risky one. When you were refining the form of the book as a whole, what did you take into consideration? Did you see the seven-chapter format early or late in the process? How did you figure out their order?

VT: In Evan S. Connell's novel Mrs. Bridge, the son, Douglas, decides to build something in the back yard. He just starts building. I think his tower has golf clubs in it, and boxes, and parts of machines-- pretty much everything he can round up. But it's set in cement, it has posts, it's strong. The book's structure started like that thing. I don't mean it was just random objects. I knew the posts were there. In the beginning I saw the book--when it began to be a book--as separate stories from a life. But as I wrote, the parts ceased to be free-standing and came to lean on each other and require each other. Finally an agent saw a story of mine (all of this happened to me suddenly and late in life) and asked to see something longer, and she called me and said, "This is a novel!" I see I'm describing everything the way I saw May's life as I was writing it, as accumulating rather than going from A to B. But in fact my definition of the novel would be a loose one. And the forms are blurring now, all of them. The order: I couldn't get it to go any other way. I did know I wanted the last chapter to be last, that the life had to make that circle. It wasn't so much that I didn't want it to end in death, since I seem to have killed off nearly everybody, but it was definitely not over until the childhood chapter. I knew where everything had taken root and I had to show how it all began, for May. But the other chapters were like horses that keep coming to the fence in a certain order.

AF: For me, this is book has a lot to say about mothers and daughters, yet neither of May's daughters has a chapter. For the Publisher's Weekly reviewer, the most moving relationship was the one with May's husband, another character without a chapter to himself. Do these reactions surprise you? Did you ever imagine writing a chapter for these characters? And what, of reactions to your novel, has surprised you most?

VT: May's daughters' lives unfold in closer proximity to hers than her son's does. I'm not sure why they don't have their own chapters. They're in every one, I think, except maybe the last. They're mainstays--as I think daughters often are, after the fires of adolescence, taking a rather parental interest in you as they get older. (I don't have daughters but I have some borrowed ones.) The fact that both daughters are temporarily out of the country in the sixth chapter is one of the things that lets May act. Actually May's husband, Cole, does have a chapter, though you're right, it's not "to himself." It's the one called "Olga Sobol," where the two of them go away for the weekend and she makes a kind of rediscovery of him when she's drawn into the story of another couple who had stayed at that inn. The reaction that has surprised me most--what a good question. It was the plot summaries in some reviews, when plot is the last thing I would have thought anyone would find in it. Long ago I studied with John Hawkes, who said about his own writing something like, "Once I had dispensed with plot, characters, setting and theme I knew I had a novel." Words to that effect. He believed "totality" was what mattered: one's particular view, even if it was through a keyhole. Especially, for Hawkes, if it was through a keyhole.

AF: This is your first novel. Congratulations! How does it feel?

VT: It has been quite an experience, wonderful and unsettling. I would never have thought a book's fate would prey on my mind this way. But luck was with me at the outset: I had an agent who cared, a wonderful editor at Little, Brown--this sounds like the Oscars. I've been writing for so many years, and I had become--not resigned but accustomed to doing it in the absence of an audience. After sending work out and getting it back, I stopped sending things. Cowardice. I started to publish non-fiction, which, probably because I was much more cavalier about it, always seemed to have an easy landing. Not that I wasn't serious about essays and reviewing, but they weren't at the core; if somebody didn't like an essay I didn't have to consider jumping out the window.

AF: You've been a contributing editor at American Poetry Review for a while. Is there a synergy between the two jobs—novelist and editor--or are they in competition?

VT: Well, in this case contributing editor isn't really a working editor, more somebody who sends in an envelope every now and then--in my case at long intervals--and recommends other writers and so on. But APR is a great magazine to write for, very soothing, because they give you a free hand. Or they did, however many years ago I sent my last piece. So various eccentricities show up in that magazine, in the prose pieces. Writing non-fiction sharpens the brain. You come out of that fictional swoon, but secretly feed the fiction-devising part. Doing research is good for that part. I used to spend a lot of time in the big heavy books of the New York Times index and in the engineering library studying nuclear submarine accidents, for a peace organization, and going up and down in the stacks is the kind of fun you can't have on Google. The habit of making sure of the facts is a good one. And certainly reading for a review or an essay is a pleasure, sometimes even a thrill. Now I'm off the subject of your question.

AF: Do you write poetry? You must read it. Can you tell us what poets are important to you? How has your involvement with poetry affected your prose writing (fiction and nonfiction).

VT: I read poetry every day and my list of vital poets would be long. I love Louise Gluck, Frank Bidart, Elizabeth Bishop, David Antin. I love Louise Bogan, and two poets she did not love, John Berryman and Randall Jarrell. John Haines is a great favorite and a sort of prophet: for so many years he has had his ear to the ground of the U.S. of A. Alicia Ostriker's poems seem to me the largest in thought and experience right now. There are some interesting new poets I think I was led to by Tao Lin, Reader of Depressing Books: Jennifer L. Knox (A Gringo Like Me) and the Montana poet Michael Earl Craig (Can You Relax in My House--wonderful). Above all I love the Spanish poets, especially Hernandez and Machado. Poetry is always looking over my shoulder saying, "Shorten that. Cut that." I write some poems but am not a poet.

AF: I think I hear Woolfian echoes in your writing and I believe that Alice Munro and Flannery O'Connor are important to you but it wasn't until the last chapter that I thought of another Seattleite who wrote great, witty short fiction: Mary McCarthy. That's the constellation of influence that I came up with. But I'd like to hear from you about the prose writers who have meant most to you.

VT: Definitely three writers who are important to me! (I remember Flannery O'Connor's remark, "At interviews I always feel like a dry cow being milked." She didn't have the pleasure of questions like these. People were always asking her, "How come so-and-so has a tattoo?") Woolf's diaries and letters have their own shelf. I love the way the old and the young are all under the same umbrella, for her. I wouldn't have thought of McCarthy but her "Memories of a Catholic Girlhood" must have gone deep; the flu of 1918 robbed her of her parents. Alice Munro is such a giant that to be unaware of her would be folly. Some of her stories leave the novel in the dust. The prose writers I reread most often are Eudora Welty and Clarice Lispector. Welty's book The Golden Apples seems to me one of the great works of the twentieth century. Lispector's The Apple in the Dark is a strange dream, as all of her work might be said to be. All these apples. Right now I'm reading the Javier Marias trilogy Your Face Tomorrow. A character says, "Life is not recountable," and I think Marias believes this, but look at this magnificent book.

AF: When May takes a ferry ride, you write "It was that moment of elementary happiness when the land is left behind and the expectation fills you that something will happen….She realized…that she had been waiting weeks to smell the deep fishy cold Pacific water." That seems quintessentially Seattle to me--a perfect description of how I feel whenever I go home to Seattle and smell Puget Sound. How long have you lived there? How important was the setting to you?

VT: I've lived in Seattle for thirty-three years. "I came here as a bride," as they say. The setting (peace to John Hawkes) was important because this is a city with an intense political history, seminal events in labor history that we don't live up to now, yet it is such a beautiful, rain-soaked, recreation-obsessed place that it's easy to simply dream here. The mountains, the water are very much present in a Seattle life and I hope present in the book. I know the water is, with its claims on more than one of the characters.

AF: May is in the middle of three generations of strong women: she had an activist mother, she herself had a committed career, and her daughters are both independent, powerful women. I would call this a feminist novel. Would you?

VT: I would. Women are worthy. Isn't that a sad flag for a cause? But we Americans are dull and slow: it had to be one of the flags of the cause of racial justice, it flies over the peace movement (people are worthy of staying alive), and it still needs to be said. Women are strong. Or if they are weak, that too has its interest, as it does with men. But men are less apt to be underrated. I remember Alice Munro saying people greeted her at first as a feminist and then turned on her when some stories went outside the bounds accepted by theory. I am not a theorist, but I love the word feminist, with its sly humor and proud seriousness.

AF: I have read that you have a story collection---and maybe another novel? in the works. Can you tell us about what we can hope for from you next?

VT: Right now I'm working on a story about a bear attack. It's very long (the story, not the attack) so may not come out anywhere except in a collection, should one get into print. I have a couple of story collections and I'm working on a novel, Into the Later. It's three novellas, really. Already they're leaning. But the posts are in.

What Is She Doing In There?

Admit it -- you don't really wonder. You go to work every day, you say "hi" because you can't not say "hi", even on those days when you'd rather keep your head down, and if you're not carrying a clipboard, there's no way to pretend that other person isn't there. On those days, even the unrelenting dull gray of the carpet is more welcome than idle conversation -- the same conversation every day! How was traffic? Do anything interesting last night? Me? Nah. You? Nah. -- with people you forget the moment the clock strikes five. Or six, as the case may be.

So you don't wonder about her, the one who has been there forever. Unless she's a kook, then you say, "Can you believe her?" And someone else, the one who pulled you away from online poker, saying, "You've got to see this," says, "Who has the time? Who has that much time?" Because you're looking at little packs of corporate coffee, arranged in precise rows like soldiers girding for battle. The first row will be gone before nine a.m. Sacrifice. There are always losers (though, you think, if you're in early enough, you'll take one from the fourth row back; screw with their minds, that's your plan). It's coffee, you think. Isn't there more to life? This is the woman, you know, who stacks the little fake creamers into pyramids every morning. And maybe you worry just a little bit because the creamer thing is weird, but the coffee thing, should you call the cops?

You don't because it's her, because she's always doing something that causes whispers. In the meantime, that other one, the one whose cubicle is just a s'kosh off the main drag, she comes in and does her thing and leaves and comes back the next day. Someday, you think, if you think about her at all, she won't be there at all. Maybe there will be a quiet retirement, maybe hushed whispers, spreading the tale of how she was found dead. Nobody noticed, not for days, because, well, who would? Or maybe one day she didn't show up, didn't die, and nobody noticed. It's a big office. These things happen.

Never once do you think that she, that woman whose sweaters seemed from another life, though you're always thinking that it's damn cold and she looks warm, did anything of note in her life. She never found passion, never felt hot and shivery at the sight of a man -- a black man, she being so white, but, well, you don't know that she held quite radical thoughts once upon a time -- so much so that she engaged in a passionate affair. And then found the guts to confess her sins to her husband. Well, you wouldn't know the reasons why, would you? Though if you asked, maybe she would have told you the truth. Mentioned that birth control in those days, well, she was young and married and women, they had kids and birth control? It was a different time and she should have been more careful -- he should have been more careful! -- but it all worked out all right. Except for the part where she had to confess. It destroyed that little secret, that little thing she had. It was hers, but so it goes.

Her life, if you consider it all, is certainly dull. What sort of adventure, what sort of imagination, could she possibly have? Those things are for the young, the wild, the living.

What you don't know, my dear, because you never ask, even though you chat politely all the time, is that she's looking at you and not seeing lost youth. You are her current passion, her current love, the one she's pinning hopes and dreams on. This, too, shall pass, she knows. But you? You'll never know. And some day, you'll be her, just off the main drag, a curiosity if someone cares to notice you.
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What you wanted me to tell you to read the book? Read the book. Seven Loves. Valerie Trueblood. In stores now. Buy it.

Seven Loves Week and Book Giveaway!!!

Here we go: this week we’re talking about Valerie Trueblood’s debut novel Seven Loves. Here’s what’s on deck: LBC members will be posting their responses to the novel throughout the week. I’ll be posting my interview with Valerie Trueblood on Wednesday. She’ll be guestblogging on Thursday--we hope this’ll give you a chance to ask her any follow-ups you might have from the Wednesday interview (it’s a good one!)--and we’ll have a podcast of an interview with her on Friday.

To get the ball rolling, we’re turning things over to you. We have a few copies (how many? we’ll know later in the week…) of Seven Loves to give away to the best comments on these two questions:

a plot contest:
The novel tells the story of one woman's life through the story of seven "loves": not the most important people, but each one illuminates something different about her character--so, there's an office crush, or the kindly but shady van driver from the nursing home. Do you have favorite novels or stories that, by zeroing in on what seems to be a "minor" relationship, get at the heart of a character?

a structure contest:
Ulysses is set in a single day; Time's Arrow moves backward; Seven Loves gives us a parade of relationships. What's your favorite unconventionally-structured novel? What's the form and why do you love it?

Write your responses in the comments section. The shining stars among them will get a free copy of the novel!

Valerie Trueblood’s Seven Loves

Next week, we’ll be talking about Valerie Trueblood’s novel-in-stories Seven Loves, my nominee for this quarter’s Read This! selection.

When I was in high school, I read Pride and Prejudice. I wanted to be Elizabeth Bennett (and thought I was well on my way) and marry Mr. Darcy. But when I read Emma, I blushed so fiercely my scalp tingled. I wanted to be Lizzie, but I was more like Emma: bossy, self-important, and headstrong. Austen had nailed me and I knew, to my discomfort, that she was great, a writer for me. I needed to attend to her: she did more than flatter me and feed my dreams; she taught me a truth about myself that I might not have seen otherwise.

Seven Loves had me blushing on the first page:

In the café, a white-haired woman is smiling at a little girl at the next table, who grins back playfully all during breakfast. The child’s mother, in a suit, silk blouse, and sneakers for the walk to work, has noticed the attention to her daughter. On the way out, she says to the older woman as they pass her table, “Should we keep her?”
The woman, May, sits very still, blank. “She is pretty cute, isn’t she?” prompts the mother in the same bright, practical voice, turning the child by the shoulders now with her fingertips.

I have been that mother, alas, “bright” and “practical,” proud to be in public and presentable with a presentable child, oblivious to the worries and preoccupations of others. Trueblood had nailed me and I was hooked.

In this opening scene, the other, May Nilsson, is the book’s center. The competent working mother disappears off-stage and we spend the rest of the chapter with May: ageing, worrying about her health, and surprised to find that she has a crush on someone at work, a blowsy divorcee.

The great and original conceit of the novel is signaled by its title: we gradually learn about May’s life through the stories of seven people whom she has loved. Some loves are central, some, while apparently peripheral, are surprisingly powerful. The prose is beautiful without being ornate. The emotions are strong and affecting. The structure, clever and complex, does not feel like a trick but like a fresh and powerful way to explore one woman’s life and loves.

If you’ve already read Seven Loves, what was the moment when the book grabbed you?

If you haven’t, do pick it up. Either way, we’ll be talking about it all next week and we look forward to your stopping back by to hear more.