First Editions Club – Page 5

On March 15, 2018

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

by Andrew Hedglin

“The secret to a happy ending,” Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers once sang, “is knowing when to roll the credits.”

Cameron Harris was a one-time high-school football phenom in Biloxi who lost his mother in a car accident, and then nearly lost his home to Hurricane Katrina. He enlisted in the Army, only to be paralyzed by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan. In what can only be described as a miracle, he suddenly regains the ability to walk four years later. The Catholic church begins an investigation to certify this as an official miracle and a reality television show is soon set to premiere about Cameron’s new life.

Any feature journalist or newspaper reporter worth his or her salt would stop the narrative right there. But he novelist Jonathan Miles, in his new faux documentary Anatomy of a Miracle, knows this story is just beginning.

Cameron’s miracle sets into motion a chain of outwardly expanding satellites struggling to make sense of this cosmic anomaly, to figure out what it could mean to live in a world where miracles might be real. First, there is Cameron’s 91 year-old black neighbor Eulalie Dooley who needs him to pray for her grandson. Then it spreads to Lê Quynh and Hat, the financially-strapped Vietnamese immigrants who own the convenience store wherein Cameron gets healed and who stand to benefit from the resulting publicity. Next, to Dr. Janice Lorimar-Cuevas, Cameron’s rational, skeptical VA doctor who is on the emotional run from her fabulist Delta father. On to Scott T. Griffin, the Southern mythos-obsessed reality television producer who knows a great story when he sees one. And further, to Euclide Abbsscia, the bemused Vatican investigator who is hired to find out the circumstances that surround Cameron’s miracle and his past. The ripples go ever onward and over Cameron and his devoted older sister and caretaker, Tanya.

If that sounds like a lot of names to keep up with, don’t worry. Miles fastidiously constructs all the characters in this community of Cameron. They all have complex histories and motivations. Characterization and setting are perhaps this finely crafted novel’s forte.

Cameron has always had a private, repressed personality, so the spotlight only begins to settle on him when his status as a spiritual celebrity is interrupted by a very public bar fight captured by the TV cameras. Cameron then is forced to reckon with his biggest secret that will threaten not only his own reputation, but the faith of many others looking to him.

Anatomy of a Miracle is a fantastic story that continually managed to surprise me. Just as I thought I had figured out what type of book I was reading, the story shifted to encompass something else. It always returned to Cameron as its axis, though. I would recommend this book especially to fans of The Nix by Nathan Hill.

I think the image I’ll keep coming back to, as its most lasting impression, is toward the very end, when Cameron visits his local parish priest Father Ace. Cameron is trying to negotiate a truce between himself and the church (and, symbolically, the public) that had drawn him in close as a sign of God’s work, then spat him back out as imperfect. Although unsuccessful, Cameron at least manages to draw a truce between himself and his very nature, defiantly and finally proclaiming his wholeness:

He wheeled around and faced the open church door, the flooded veins of his neck surging. “I’m not living in a state of grace?” he said aloud, unconsciously shifting from foot to foot in a defiant shuffle-step every one of his lower body’s nerves thrumming and twitching his voice climbing from a choke to a shout. “I’m not? I’m not?”

Jonathan Miles will be Lemuria on Tuesday, March 20, at 5:00 to sign and read from Anatomy of a Miracle. Anatomy of a Miracle is one of Lemuria’s two March 2018 selections for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

‘The Fighter’ is a fascinating new novel from Michael Farris Smith

On March 14, 2018

In Southern Fiction

By Matthew Guinn. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 11)

“Do anything but bore me,” the late novelist Harry Crews once said in an interview.

“Tie me up and beat me with a motorcycle chain if you must, but don’t bore me.”

Mississippi writer Michael Farris Smith apparently shares that sentiment. Crews’ statement could be the mantra of The Fighter.

The Fighter opens with a harrowing scene of high-speed DUI and pretty much never lets up from there. It’s the tale of a washed-up, alcohol- and pill-addicted cage fighter prepping for what will be his very last fight—either for good or ill. The stakes are life-or-death—no quarter asked or given. It is a brutal subculture of the South we know, but a fascinating one.

Jack, the titular fighter, should have turned out better. Though orphaned as a toddler, he was raised lovingly in Clarksdale by a devoted foster mother, Maryann (one of the most endearing characters in recent Southern fiction). And yet, as though driven by some kind of genetic predisposition, the teenaged Jack learns and loves the art of bare-knuckle boxing. Soon he is crisscrossing the Southeast for one underworld matchup after another. He climbs to the top of the heap.

But Jack’s champion status comes at a steep cost. He numbs the years of blows and undiagnosed concussions with painkillers and booze. The combined effect is a general amnesia that renders him vulnerable to the cunning. Add in his history of fixing or ‘throwing’ fights for gambling profit, and Jack becomes a walking disaster, a veritable tornado over himself. It is difficult to tell which came first—his pill or gambling addiction. Regardless, each feeds the other.

Enter Big Momma Sweet. In the world of The Fighter, predators are as common as the buzzards that dot the Delta sky, and Big Momma is the queen of them all. From her camp outside Clarksdale, she presides over an empire of fighting, gambling, drugs, and prostitution. Jack is her biggest debtor. His only prospect for settling up with her is one last prize fight—one he is woefully unprepared to fight, perhaps not even to survive.

And then there is a carnival that alights on Clarksdale: a touring regional fair full of convicts, gypsies, and a tattooed lady who just might prove to be Jack’s redemption.
If this synopsis sounds chaotic, frenetic, and over-the-top, then it is accurate. By conventional thinking, there is too much going on in The Fighter’s 256 pages for the short novel to bear. It should not work.

But it does. Smith’s narrative manages to stay just ahead of disintegration, and does so with style, lush prose, and storytelling assurance. Though its protagonist is a disaster, The Fighter is a triumph. It confirms Smith’s status as one of our foremost authors in the Rough South, Grit Lit tradition established by Crews, Larry Brown, Tom Franklin, William Gay, and the towering Cormac McCarthy.

The Fighter is Smith’s third novel in just five years, following 2017’s Desperation Road and 2013’s Rivers. That body of work has established Smith’s aesthetic: a naturalistic South of people living tough lives on the margins, where grace comes hard but the sad stories play out beautifully. All of Smith’s people are on one road or another toward an uncertain future. It will be a harrowing thrill to follow him farther down that road, with his characters just a single step—make that a half-step—ahead of destruction.

Novelist Matthew Guinn is the author of The Resurrectionist and The Scribe. He is associate professor of creative writing at Belhaven University.

Michael Farris Smith will be Lemuria on Thursday, March 22, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from The Fighter, which is one of Lemuria’s two March 2018 selections for our First Editions Club for Fiction.

‘An American Marriage’ powerfully illuminates nature of human will

On February 26, 2018

In African-American, Fiction, Southern Fiction

By Kelly Pickerill. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 25)

Tayari Jones’ fourth novel, An American Marriage (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill), quickly reaches its inciting incident. 9781616201340-2T Newlyweds Celestial and Roy drive from their home in Atlanta to visit Roy’s parents in Eloe, Louisiana. Tension between Celestial and her mother-in-law makes the young couple decide to rent a hotel room rather than stay at the house. At the hotel, an argument between the couple sends Roy out of their room for less than an hour, an hour that will determine the course of both of their lives.

That night, a woman at the hotel is raped, and she accuses Roy, with whom she had a brief encounter earlier in the evening at the ice machine. Despite a lack of physical evidence, Roy is convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison. After Roy serves five years of his sentence, a lawyer hired by Celestial’s family succeeds in getting Roy’s conviction overthrown.

The novel then explores the consequences those five years have on Celestial and Roy’s marriage. As the novel progresses, Jones manages to avoid many tempting paths. An American Marriage does not become an agenda-driven indictment of the failings of America’s criminal justice system, particularly involving black men.

Jones also frees her characters from the pitfalls stereotypically associated with black incarceration: drug abuse, undereducation, and poverty (Roy comes from a boostrap family, but he attended college and is on his way to becoming a moderately successful executive; Celestial, on the other hand, comes from new money, hasn’t wanted for anything, was given the resources and encouragement to embrace her creativity, and is beginning to break out as an artist who makes unique, high-end dolls).

When Celestial takes comfort in her neighbor and childhood friend Andre several years into Roy’s incarceration, and they eventually become engaged, the novel doesn’t become a character study or a bereft or cuckolded husband.

Instead, moving forward and backward through time, Celestial, Roy, and Andre in turn tell their stories. They each tell the story of what they want now that Roy has been freed, and what happened in the past that brought them to this point.

An American Marriage powerfully illluminates the nature of human will–how it adapts, but sometimes breaks, how it can transform, or be denied or asserted, and what makes it stronger. There are consequences to every one of our choices, large and small, that we make every day. And those choices affect who we are fundamentally. Though what happens to us can often be out of our own control, who we are is, ultimately, made up of our choices–of what we decide to do with the cards we’ve been dealt.

Tayari Jones will be at Lemuria on Monday, February 26, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from An American Marriage. An American Marriage is the February 2018 selection for Lemuria’s First Editions Club for Fiction.

‘An American Marriage’ weds the personal, the political, and the poetic

On February 22, 2018

In African-American, Fiction, Southern Fiction

by Trianne Harabedian

Every so often, I get to be the first person at Lemuria to read a book that I know is going to be wonderful. 9781616201340-2T I jumped on our advanced reader copy of An American Marriage by Tayari Jones because I had seen it advertised everywhere. The story looked intriguing, the blue and golden cover is gorgeous, and I was excited. Then the news came out that Oprah had picked it for her book club, so the attention on this novel and Tayari Jones skyrocketed. And as someone who read the book *before it was cool*, I’m here to tell you that it is absolutely worth the hype.

Told from all three perspectives, the story of Celestial, Roy, and Andre is complicated. Celestial and Roy are still in the honeymoon phase of their marriage when Roy is arrested and sent to prison. Everyone knows he didn’t commit the crime. But as a black man in a legal system overrun with stereotypes, he is sentenced to twelve years even without solid evidence. As Roy mourns the loss of his whole life, Celestial turns her pain into artistic, handcrafted dolls. Letters keep the couple close at first, but life moves on quickly. And whenever Celestial needs support, her childhood friend, Andre, is there.

Celestial, Roy, Andre, and their stories captured my heart. But the storytelling stole my breath. Tayari Jones’s writing moves like a river, hurrying readers along with little effort on their part. It feels simplistic and uncomplicated, yet the undercurrents of the story are incredibly complex and the writing itself holds the reader afloat with invisible strength. I loved the way the novel focuses on the characters themselves, on their inner thoughts and feelings and turmoil. The plot progresses gently, so I wanted to know what would happen but was more caught up in emotions.

It would have been easy for Tayari Jones to turn this novel into political propaganda in hopes of making a point or benefiting from the current political climate. Instead, this is a story about people. While their backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses are important, they are simply part of the larger tale. And instead of focusing on the developing love triangle, this is a story about families and the ripple effects of injustice and tragedy.

This novel went beyond my expectations. Complex characters, beautiful writing, and a story with just enough ebb and flow, Tayari Jones and An American Marriage certainly deserve all of the publicity and praise.

Staff Pick: ‘Fire Sermon’ by Jamie Quatro

By Lemuria

On January 24, 2018

Jamie Quatro comes to Lemuria tomorrow (Thursday, January 25) to sign and talk about her new novel, Fire Sermon. We’ve already posted Jana Hoops’s interview with the author, and Lemuria’s own Kelly Pickerill’s review from the Clarion-Ledger. We’ve already selected it as our January selection for our First Editions Club, but so many of our booksellers loved the book so much, we wanted to tell you how this book’s reading experience moved us personally. We’re so excited about this book that we wanted to get you excited, too! We hope to see everybody tomorrow at 5:00.

Aimee:

When I first heard what the plot of Fire Sermon was, I was little hesitant. However, most of my coworkers that had read it were raving about it, so I decided to give it a shot. Boy, am I glad I did! I took this home with me for Christmas, and it was the perfect book to curl up with in front of the fire (no pun intended).

Trianne:

I loved Fire Sermon because the way the story is told–through thoughts and memories, making the story feel familiar. Those things comprise the inner monologue we all have when contemplating our lives, the way we retell our history to ourselves to make sure we know who we are.

Guy:

Fire Sermon reminds us how easily desire can be set alight by anticipation, and, on my favorite pages, how desire remembered is just as combustible. Quatro’s powerful writing stitches together letters and narration seamlessly to yield a dynamic and moving portrait of a life combed through. With surety, she drives home the notion that the truth unfolded and untangled looks a little different every time we find it.

Dorian:

Jamie Quatro brilliantly captures the relationship between spirituality and desire, the eternal and the carnal. The language was so lush, but at the same intimate, as if it were reaching into my own ideas about faith and fidelity. Thank you, Jamie Quatro, for sharing a story of humanity, even when it’s unfaithful to itself.

Austen:

Quatro’s first novel is fire. She deftly flows through God and poetry here to explore the many wires that frame a life. A sensuous and heady cocktail of a book. Everyone should read this.

Hillary:

I loved Quatro’s lyrical writing style, how the story didn’t have a linear timeline and how thoughts varied throughout the book. I think this style of writing really gives the reader insight into the narrator’s mind and adds humanity to the novel. Even if you haven’t personally experienced some of the situations or circumstances that Quatro’s narrator has, you will still feel a connection of empathy, love, and desire to this book like you have not experienced before.

Kelly:

In Fire Sermon, Quatro plumbs truths about the gratification and restraint of desire, about the intimacy and estrangement of marriage, and about the steadfastness and inconsistency of faith…This is a novel that is more than the sum of its parts. Maggie is a real human being, and Quatro’s prose never judges her, so the reader can’t either… In anyone else’s hands, the level of empathy might not be as strong; Quatro adeptly depicts a messy situation with flawed people in a way that connects us with our own shortcomings.

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Author Q & A with Jamie Quatro

On January 22, 2018

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 21)

Jamie Quatro’s debut novel, Fire Sermon (Grove Atlantic), weaves a pensive tale of lust and desire that comes as an unexpected but surprisingly desirable consequence of an innocent exchange of digital messages between main characters Maggie (a writer) and James (a published poet whose work she admires).

The twist on the Nashville author’s story is that both parties are devoted spouses and parents who had no intention of ever finding themselves drawn into the daring–but undoubtedly pleasurable–relationship. And then there’s the matter of Maggie’s faith, which clearly disallows such behavior, and quickly adds tension to an already questionable turn of events.

As a fiction writer, Quatro said she doesn’t remember a time in her life when she wasn’t creating stories.

“In fact, I wrote my first story in second grade,” she said. “I only member this because my mom saved it. It was called ‘The Sad Day and the Happy Day.’ The sad day was when Sally’s mother told her it never snowed in teh desert on the border of Mexico, where they lived; happy day was when Sally woke to see snow covering the cacti. I suspect the story was heavily influenced by Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day.”

Today, Quatro’s fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in The New York Times Book Review, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, and others. Her stories have also appeared in teh 2017 Pushcart Prize Anthology, Ann Charters’s The Story and Its Writer, and in O. Henry Prize Stories 2013.

Her debut collection, I Want to Show You More (Grove Press), was a New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. I twas also chosen as a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2013; a New Yorker Favorite Book of 2013 and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Georgia Townsend Fiction Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.

A contributing editor for the Oxford American, Quatro teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program. She lives with her husband and four children in Lookout Mountain, Georgia.

An accomplished author, you are already known for your fiction, poetry, and essays. Fire Sermon is your debut novel. In what ways was it different from previous writing projects?

Jamie Quatro

I was under contract for a different novel and kept sneaking away to write sections of Fire Sermon. It was a delicious form of procrastination. I was sure I would never show anyone the pages. Once I reached page 100 or so, I told my agent about the cheating. She loved the pages and urged me to finish the book. I wrote the rest of it quickly, in a couple of months.

Fire Sermon is your first novel–one that’s sure to catch the attention of many readers. You’ve taken an age-old plot–two happily married people are drawn to other loves, and find themselves caught between their dual loves and their faith in God. Why this topic?

In my first book, there were six or seven stories about an almost-affair. I felt I’d only begun to scratch the surface of the infidelity theme. I hadn’t pushed as far as I’d wanted to, into the physical and spiritual. A professor in graduate school told me, once, that I needed to let my characters be messier–to do things on the hpage I would never do.

The main characters, Maggie and James, are unquestionably drawn to each other, and are amazed to discover their similarities…both are middle-aged writers, happily married for the same number of years, with the same number of children, and they even have 96-year-old grandmothers. How did this make the story more powerful?

The fact that James and Maggie have so much in common–even as Maggie has increasingly less in common with her husband–is in many ways the very appeal of the affair. The superficial commonalities mirror the much more significant intellectual, spiritual, and sexual bonds.

Your writing style is varied, to say the least–no quotation marks, no particular chronological order, conversations with an unnamed therapist, random journal entries, sometimes a stream of consciousness style of quickly firing strings of facts. Characters are referred to as “the husband,” “the wife,” “the daughter,” etc. How did you develop this approach?

The structure of the novel evolved over time, draft after draft. I think it has something to do with the desire to tell a story from multiple angles and time frames. Maybe a wish to escape the confines of linear time altogether. So rather than stringing beads along a thread, drafting felt more like rotating a cut diamond in the light, to watch the light reflect and refract from various facets.

What are the messages Maggie shares in her attempts at poetry?

The first time she sends poems (to James) she’s hoping for feedback–hoping, too, that James won’t think the poems are bunk. The second time the poems are more erotic. I suppose you could say she’s using them to draw James in.

After a few businesslike e-mail exchanges that begin when Maggie contacts James to praise his new book of poetry, the flirtations in their messages soon grow bolder and bolder, encouraged initially by him, but with Maggie’s immediate complicity. It becomes a relationship that will haunt them forever, as it tries Maggie’s Christian faith. Why did you choose to include the element of faith into this story?

When an act is forbidden, it often becomes more enticing. In this case, the religious rules against adultery heightens the thrill of breaking that rule. It also magnifies the subsequent guilt Maggie feels. How to lose the guilt but keep the erotic thrill alive somewhere inside–this becomes Maggie’s psychological and spiritual struggle.

As Maggie watches her 21-year-old daughter growing into an accomplished young woman, she realizes that her children are “the reason for [her] existence.” Is this a reflection on the state of her marriage and her split loyalties, or one you believe is shared by most mothers at this stage of life?

I can’t speak for other mothers, but I certainly don’t see my children as the reason for my existence. As they’ve grown, I’ve felt more and more like the person I was before having children. There’s something sad and lonely about Maggie’s statement. It’s probably more a reflection of the state of her mind and marriage than it is a universal feeling.

Please explain the title “Fire Sermon.” Certainly, it was a “sermon” Maggie had needed to say out loud for a long time.

The title comes from the Adittapariyaya Sutta–the Fire Sermon–in the Buddhist Pali Canon. It was one of the first sermons the Buddha gave after his enlightenment. T.S. Eliot, of course, also used it as a section title in “The Waste Land,” in which he references St. Augustine’s Confessions, and links the Buddhist Fire Sermon to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. So, the title references two ways of dealing with yearning and desire, Eastern and Western: confession and repentance, or recognition that burning is the result of attachment and illusion. The dialogue between Eastern and Western modes of thought is a thread throughout the novel.

Do you have other writing projects in the works?

I’m working on another novel and have almost finished a new story collection.

Jamie Quatro will be at Lemuria on Thursday, January 25, at 5:00 p.m. to sign copies of Fire Sermon and read from the book at 5:30 p.m. Fire Sermon is Lemuria’s January 2018 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Jamie Quatro’s ‘Fire Sermon’ explores desire

On January 18, 2018

By Kelly Pickerill. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 14)

Jamie Quatro’s second book and first novel seems, by the summary, as through it may be an expanded version of one of her stories.

Her first book, a collection of short stories called I Want to Show You More, was populated with characters whose predilections included running, infidelity, and theology, though not necessarily in that order.

With Fire Sermon (Grove Press), Quatro has proven that she can successfully make something new out of the same materials, and do so in ways that are fearless, boundary-pushing, and exhilarating to read. As she did in More, Quatro plumbs truths about the gratification and restraint of desire, about the intimacy and estrangement of marriage, and about the steadfastness and inconsistency of faith.

Maggie’s marriage to Thomas and their two children seems perfect from the outside–they married young, had two children, and enjoy a comfortable commitment. But an innocent exchange of letters between Maggie and a poet, James, who shares her spiritual acuity, sparks a desire in Maggie that she finds herself helpless to resist.

Quatro uses several storytelling devices throughout the novel–emails, therapy sessions, prayers, poetry, even a sermon. The affair unfolds in pieces that are out of order chronologically, narrated by Maggie in first person. Maggie and Thomas’s story is written in third person, where Maggie is referred to as “the bride” or “she,” but the reader senses it is really Maggie who is narrating at a distance, perhaps removing herself from the memories, from the past.

The more traditional prose sections have a dreaminess about them, as though you’re being told a story by someone close to you, but the memory they’re describing is one you lived, as well, so you have the benefit of remembering while also being reminded.

Some passages read like they happened long ago, the repercussions almost forgotten. Reading others, what’s happening is so immediate you feel like you might be able to stop it by crying out.

Fire Sermon is a novel that is more than the sum of its parts. Maggie is a real human being, and Quatro’s prose never judges her, so the reader can’t either.

The choices she makes are not necessarily right for anyone, not for Maggie, not for James, not for Thomas. But they’re her choices.

In anyone else’s hands, the level of empathy might not be as strong; Quatro adeptly depicts a messy situation with flawed people in a way that connects us with our own shortcomings.

Jamie Quatro will be at Lemuria on Thursday, January 25, at 5:00 p.m. to sign copies of Fire Sermon and read from the book at 5:30 p.m. Fire Sermon is Lemuria’s January 2018 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Mark Helprin

On November 15, 2017

“Mark Helprin’s Lifetime of Writing”

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (November 12)

Bestselling author Mark Helprin’s fluid, lyrical writing spills forth again in his newest novel, “Paris in the Present Tense,” a grand tale of music, regret, passion, and family love that finds its writer once again borrowing from the people, places and circumstances of his own experiences to flesh out a solid and relatable plot that, in essence, draws the reader into his own world.

A New York City native who grew up in a nearby suburb of the city, Helprin earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard University, and completed post-graduate work at Princeton University and Magdalen College, Oxford. A prolific writer, he has authored five novels, three children’s books, three short story collections, and many essays. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, the National Review and many other periodicals.

You’ve enjoyed a full life — world traveler, family man, would-be farm hand and at times you’ve turned your attention to politics (mostly through your deep interest in policy), journalism, the military, and your own formal education, not to mention an amazing career as a writer. How have you managed to fit so many interests into your seven decades?

Seven decades is a long time, and I started early. My first job was manufacturing sealing-wax-and-ribbon medallions for a women’s clothing store. It was an assembly-line process to which I devoted part of my weekends, piece work at 25 cents per medallion. I would earn about $500 per annum then, or, in today’s dollars, $5,000. I was eight. I used to dictate stories to my third-grade teacher, and Simon & Schuster wanted to publish them, but my father didn’t allow it, because my mother had been a child star and he thought that it had near ruined her.

Also, if you keep busy, you can do several things at once. When I was in college I wrote my first stories for the New Yorker, continuing to do so in graduate school and during military service. If you live on a farm, the farm tells you what to do, not vice versa.

The irony is that I hate to be busy, and have been too busy all my life in the hope that it would enable me not to be busy. And please don’t call me a world traveler. I hate to travel, and it reminds me of the magnificent line of Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny, when she says to Vinny, “So whata you, a _____ world travelah?”

Your fiction is known for its robust, adventurous plots and its lyrical syntax, always with a bit of romanticism, fantasy and autobiographical hints. Reading your work, it’s obvious that you not only enjoy writing, but you love your characters and your storylines. Tell me how you developed your literary writing style – and what drove you to become a writer in the first place.

This question requires a book-length answer, but I’ll be brief. I do love my characters, most of them. What’s the point otherwise? From my very first book, my motto has been taken from Dante, “Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare, (Love moved me, and made me speak)”. If I may paint with a very broad brush, what ails so much of modern fiction is its detachment from and hostility toward that which it depicts. If a writer wants to be a prosecutor, he should go to law school and apply to the Bronx DA.

Your newest book, “Paris in the Present Tense,” is another fictional work presented on a grand scale. In this story of an aging man consumed with worry about his grandson’s serious illness, main character Jules Lacour is keenly aware of his own inability to offer much in the way of financial support. A deep thinker with strong convictions, he looks back on his own life with his share of regrets and fears. In many ways, most of us have a lot in common with Lacour. Can you share your reflections on him?

Ah! My reflection on him runs to 400 pages, and I can share all of it with your readers if they buy the book, or get it from the library. So many contemporary novels are politicized, sexualized, and sensationalized. And although this tends to result in narrow treatments of one subject – kind of like an expanded magazine article – as a means to deliver a single message, I think a novel should be about many things, with many themes running along and across many strata, so that in the end the book becomes more than just the sum of its parts, as are a man or a woman, as is Jules Lacour. Like all of us, he is so complex that I hesitate to dwell on one or another of his characteristics. The object is to portray as much in full what God has made not fully portrayable.

As usual, your characters are intensely developed, tying their perspectives together in the end. You’ve spent your career creating these “people” and their far-reaching (and often far-flung) circumstances. How do you stumble upon these characters and their situations?

Though they may think they do, writers and painters don’t create anything, they rearrange elements of the creation of which they are part. That’s why Leonardo, Raphael, Rembrandt, and even the French Impressionists had models, whether people or nature. The entire structure of Western – indeed, universal – art, is based on observation and interpretation of reality, and even the most abstract painters can only use colors that are a gift of creation. ‘So with writers, who must use models as a basis of their characters. As a newborn, even Shakespeare, had he magically been able to write, could not have written before he had observed the world.

All the characters to which you refer are based, even if loosely, on real people. For example, in “Paris in the Present Tense,” Louis Mignon, the French baker in Rheims, his wife, and son, and what they did during the war, are based on Louis Mignon, a French baker in Rheims, and his wife Marie, who did in the war exactly that, and with whom I lived (their son Jacques had grown up and left) for four years. In (my book), Winter’s Tale,” Peter Lake was based on Peter Lake, aka Grand Central Pete, a thief who lived in New York at the turn of the 19th century. Of course, one is wonderfully free to exaggerate, play down, add, subtract, and imagine characteristics and situations per need.

You’ve also written several children’s books. Is it difficult to switch to a different mindset and writing style to create authentic stories for children?

Not at all, in that one should never talk down to children. In fact, if any adjustment need be made, it is in simplifying language and thus purifying it rather than making it cute-sy. The best children’s books are just as attractive, meaningful, and beautiful to adults as they are to children. If you can reach the soul of a child, you will also reach the soul of an adult. As Wordsworth wrote, “the child is father of the man.” If one cannot, even in the darkest hours, retrieve or at least remember the innocence and goodness of childhood, then, really, what’s the point?

Making another shift, you’ve long filled a role as being somewhat of a statesman, and have advised politicians at the highest level on matters of policy. Tell me about your experience in that role, and how it came to be.

Quite simply, I knew from the second grade that I was a writer, but being a practical sort – and having a very practical sort of father – I understood that I’d have to have another way to support a family. So, I studied what might be called war and diplomacy. This led to many adventures, and, somehow, to being a newspaper columnist, a defense analyst, and occasionally – when the muckamucks I was advising realized I could put a sentence together – an always unpaid speech writer. That’s mostly frustrating, and I try not to do that whenever I can, which these days I hope is forever.

Being a person of your many talents, is there anything you want to accomplish in life that you haven’t attempted yet? And what did you do before writing became your job title?)

I was a kid. I had a dog, a 22., skates, and a hockey stick. There were a thousand acres around my house on the Hudson, and when I wasn’t doing homework I disappeared in them and was perfectly content. At 70, what I want to accomplish most is to remain alive, write some more books, and sit in the garden. I have no more ambition. Nor at my age would it be seemly. That’s astoundingly liberating and the cause of great happiness.

Can you share any info about your next book or other writing projects?

I’ve been thinking about it, making notes, and studying the milieu in which it takes place, for about a year. When this book tour is over I’ll have to spend about two weeks repairing fences, cutting up fallen trees, hogging down fields, and fixing stuff. Then, with winter, I’ll enter the paradise of writing every day in – I hope – wonderful tranquility.

Mark Helprin will sign and read from Paris in the Present Tense Thursday, November 16, at 5:00 p.m. at Lemuria.

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‘Paris in the Present Tense’ is an ode to love, remorse, and hope

On November 15, 2017