Interview

I've always been curious about families and their peculiar patterns, which seem to carry over from one generation to the next. In the Shapiro family, patterns of secrecy and constraint have been carried across the Atlantic by the immigrants Eva and Jake, who grew up in a place both vanished and vanquished from memory. In the title story, Rachel says that in her grandmother's house "history was a door shut tight before my mother was born—her parents' early lives long since put away in that dark bristling silence called Europe. Enough ugliness, Eva always said. Why would we burden a child?

Both Eva and Jake, secretive and cautious for their own reasons, surely have the best intentions: as Jewish immigrants transplanted into a Midwestern, middle class world they hide their histories and even their current troubles from their youngest, their last, child, in the belief that they are doing the right thing, giving the next generation a fresh start.

But what happens to that next generation, schooled in the art of not telling? Clara and Abe, in different ways and for difference reasons, will follow similar patterns, learning to hide their own unresolved griefs and desires—as well as the physical suffering of Abe's final illness—out of a wish to "spare" their own children, imagining such knowledge will damage them somehow. I like to imagine that somewhere back in the lives of our ancestors, little patterns of protection and safety—the desire to keep from burdening a child—got established, and these patterns, shadowy and changing all the time, are still with us. I want to trace out the visible strands, and imagine what the consequences might be.

It's true that the "act of secrecy" may be wildly out of proportion to the secret itself—particularly for the characters of Clara and her daughter Rachel. You might think of "keeping a secret," in Clara's case, as the ultimate creative or imaginative act, born out of her fear that her life will go nowhere, have no meaning. With every new secret drama, she is giving herself the sensation—titillating and dangerous—that her life matters.

Sometimes this point of view feels ill-advised and dangerous—like some crazed architecture or baroque fugue. But finally, it's the only way I can handle the dynamic of freedom and constraint that fuels my impulse to write, and that keeps me pressing to know more about my characters. I think I ended up writing this way in an effort to break through my own inhibitions as a storyteller. I grew up the youngest of four kids, and always had the feeling I was missing something crucial, or getting the story wrong. Inventing, or praying that my memory was right, I'd leap out into the family conversation with some story, and everybody would look at me like I was nuts. Rightly so, I'm sure. At the dinner table in our family, stories were an endless source of fine disagreement, but what was wonderful and terrifying was that each person was sure they had it right, and told their version with tremendous authority. We still do. But early on, it felt—to me, as the youngest—like a fierce competition. Could this be where Rachel's narrative voice comes from? She always begins from a position of brief authority: here is the one thing I know, she says. All the arguments, the imagined bits, the speculations and failed memories spring from that brief spark of authority. She is constantly "fishing" for the truth, sending out different kinds of lures to see what will take. It feels like an honest position to start from, and I love playing with a variety of methods: speculation, memory, invention, and possible tiny truths flecked all around. Maybe it's akin to painting: wanting to use different brushstrokes very close together.

Back to earth: as long as the "omniscient" narrator admits where she is and why she feels compelled to try to get at a particular mystery, and as long as she'll admit when she's inventing and what her sources have at stake, I'd say the first person omniscient offers the best opportunity for scope—and for imaginative discovery—of all the voices and forms we know about so far.

Restraint, the sudden yanking back of the reins, is absolutely crucial to the process, though. If anything makes "first person omniscient" work, it's that—the moments where somebody (often the narrator herself) says, "No—that's not quite the truth." Then the internal debate can begin, and the drama rise.

Actually, it's even crazier than that: he visits Rachel as a ghost, after death, to make his confession. I mean to suggest by this that the dialogue between family members, especially on unresolved things like secrets, continues long after death. Abe's ghost is conjured up out of love and yearning: he is a manifestation of the adult-child's wish to learn something new about her parents after their deaths, maybe even come to feel that she "knows them better" in the years that follow. The desire to know our parents after they're gone fascinates me: it's an extension of the child's impulse to speculate and invent. The child who may have had limited access to information and stories during her parents' lifetimes, may be free to research and discover, at last, what went down.

And always, always, to invent. For even if you accept the presence of Abe as a visiting ghost who wants to do a little repair work with his daughter, you still see Rachel inventing her father's experience—pretty much wholesale. There's not much "source citation" in this story; that is, she just drops into the imagined experience, rarely saying, "My father told me" or otherwise reminding us she's narrating. The story is a gift to her father, you could say, an unabashed fantasy of the kind he himself loved. No apologies, no hedging. It is now as much her creation as his.

Why save this story for last? I guess I thought of it as an act of compassion, my gift to a character who mystified me throughout the process of writing these stories. I had a wonderful writing teacher once, James Alan McPherson, who said, referring to one of a father in one of my stories, "You need to give him something." It took me years to figure out what he meant, but I came to understand that we must give a little bit of our own peculiar vulnerability to a character to make him really live on the page, and must love him. Who better than a mysterious father?

And what does Charlie Baxter say? "You must love your characters, and then visit trouble upon them." This story belongs fully to Abe Gershon—nobody but Abe. He's been a figure on the sidelines or near-center at best for the whole collection, and I wanted to give him the center, and celebrate his experience, right at the end. Yes, it's definitely a present, since he waited so patiently all that time.

First, I should confess that I find this idea of a "throwback" an irresistibly romantic notion, and a big part of me is just an unrepentant romantic, fatalistic teenager who refuses to grow up. However, I'm aware of this, so I keep trying to balance it out with voices like Eva's, who remind us how dangerous it is to get caught up in romantic notions. But finally, for me, this is the magnetic thing: the possibility that traits are passed down to us, and occasionally "miss" a generation, so they seem to appear out of nowhere and wreak havoc, or at least mess with our sense of control over our lives. So, this kid, Rachel, who has been raised, in part, under her grandmother's idea that to be ordinary is to be safe, is also, with her almond-shaped eyes, being handed down the "curse" or the "gift" of the unknowable self, the person who may in fact break out of the mold—for good or for ill—disrupting the order so desperately established by her elders. Doesn't every child hope, at some level, that she has a mystery waiting inside of her? Is mystery another word for freedom? Something is going to happen to me, and I don't know what, but these eyes are a sign of my difference, my possibility.

That is very romantic, isn't it? And contradictory . . .

Well, my first thought is that a different writer could have saved poor Clara earlier. I was interested in seeing how far she would go given the powerful constraints she has grown up with from day one: Eva's careful raising of her, her father's gentle distance, the whole house seeming to participate in a conspiracy. To save her would be to take her much further, to push her to further action. For instance, in "Elegy for Miss Beagle," what if she didn't flee the house in a sudden panic when she felt that touch, or, what if, in the session with the artist and his wife, the whole situation didn't frighten her so, or she confronted her cousin's husband…or she left town and family like her great-grandmother, simply vanished. But finally she stays in her life, in her family and community, and it's the friction between the desire to leap out of its confines and her sense of belonging and compassion, that I'm interested in. The "almost" nature of our lives, and how we come to be reconciled with that.

"Gravity," however, is a bit different. She goes on a ride; she is out of her depth, and out of the convention and familiarity of her life. That's a gift to her, as "Malingerer" is to Abe.

Absolutely, if by Jewish heritage we are talking about one specific form of the Jewish American experience. There are so many kinds—like thumbprints. But this family is typical in that it came to America with a past it wanted to forget, and is haunted, into its present, by what it missed by leaving Europe "just in time." My own family came to America around 1904, and there is a fragment of a story of a great grandmother who abandoned her children and vanished, utterly, leaving these boys to make their way to America without a lot of help. Or so the fragment has come down to me. There are scraps of other stories too, but what always compelled me was how disputed these "scraps" of story were, and how little of them remained. The other "characteristics" that seem culturally Jewish to me are the dreamy grandfather, who is a kind of uncelebrated mystic in his goodness and prescience, and the sharp-tongued practical Eva: I think they're probably traditional figures in Jewish folk stories going way, way back. I'll have to investigate someday. But for starters, here is one Jewish legend that has always influenced my stuff: I'll tell it loosely, badly: the story goes that in every generation there are 36 "just men" who are the vessels of the world's grief, and it is on their account that God has not yet destroyed the world. The most beautiful thing about the 36 just men is this: they have no idea who they are.

Maybe that's the ultimate mystery of character, and why Rachel might hope that there is a living connection to an unknowable past, and that the future—whatever it is—is also written there. We sense it's there, but the answer is, like the Jewish Messiah—something we long for, desire, and await. It is written, but in a language we haven't yet learned to read.