INTERVIEW: JONATHAN LEE

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT Jonathan Lee

Tanka Kernweiss

The author of three previous books, Lee enthralled our critic with The Great Mistake (Knopf, June 15), a novel inspired by the life of a little-remembered New Yorker with an outsized impact on the shape of the city. Our reviewer called it an “exceptional work of historical fiction.” Lee answered some questions by email.

How did you first discover the historical figure of Andrew Haswell Green, and what made you want to write a novel about him? I was walking in Central Park one summer day when I came across a granite memorial bench in a shady spot. Before I sat down, I read the inscription—“In Honor of Andrew Haswell Green, Creating Genius of Central Park and Father of Greater New York.” I took out my phone, opened a new window, and began to look into his life. I had never heard of him before. I had no idea about his life (without him there might be no Central Park, no Metropolitan Museum of Art, no New York Public Library…), and I didn’t know anything yet about his death, either—he was murdered on Park Avenue at the age of 83 in a fascinating case of mistaken identity.

What kind of research did you do about New York at the turn of the 20th century? I was lucky to discover a treasure trove of documents at the New York Public Library and also at the New York Historical Society Library. The latter had boxes of Green’s diaries and letters that no one had checked out for many years. Disappearing into his handwriting—which, at first, was pretty impossible to read— was like slipping into a portal onto his past. I also found various newspaper archives to be useful—to be able to read the New York Times from a specific day, maybe the day on which a crucial scene unfolded, freed me from a reliance on secondary sources that started to feel like they carried more of the distortions of hindsight. I got in the habit of reading the New York Times from various days in 1871, 1886, 1903— it was a good excuse to avoid current events. For me, “current events” became past events—and there was some comfort in knowing that however bad those events were, they had an ending, in history, and here the world was, in the present, still turning in its own dizzying style. I developed this habit of reading all the ancient issues of the Times paper back to front, because I’d started to find the smaller stories were more interesting to me than the big front-page headlines. I’m not sure people, most of the time, really live their lives within those front-page headlines. I found more fascination and room for imagination in the spaces between smaller columns on Page 27 or wherever—the events that were noted for a day and then fell into forgetting.

What was it like having a book come out in 2021? How did you connect with readers in this socially distanced year? I’m lucky to have an amazing publicist, Emily Reardon, who got the book some great coverage despite

the challenges posed by the pandemic—and I was lucky also that I got to do a few in-person events outdoors, alongside lots of time on Zoom. The Brooklyn Book Festival was a highlight, as was a small gathering organized by the historian Michael Miscione at Andrew Haswell Green’s memorial bench, where my novel first came to life. But I think part of the pleasure of books has always been that you can connect with readers on the page, wherever they might be. I might be better on the page than in person.…

Who is the ideal reader for your book, and where would they be reading it? If they’re reading my book, they’re my ideal reader. And if they are reading it in a park, that would make me extra happy.

What work of fiction most dazzled you this year? I hugely enjoyed Are You Enjoying? by Mira Sethi— provocative, insightful stories of contemporary life in Pakistan.

Interview by Tom Beer.

bad mood,” Tookie decides. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day 2019 with a book splayed next to her—she didn’t have time to put a bookmark in it—but she continues shuffling through the store’s aisles even after her cremation. Tookie is recently out of prison for transporting a corpse across state lines, which would have netted her $26,000 had she not been ratted out and had the body not had crack cocaine duct-taped to its armpits, a mere technicality of which Tookie was unaware. Tookie is also unaware that Flora considered Tookie to be her best friend and thus sticks to her like glue in the afterlife, even smacking a book from the fiction section onto the floor during a staff meeting at Birchbark. The novel’s humor is mordant: “Small bookstores have the romance of doomed intimate spaces about to be erased by unfettered capitalism.” The characters are also haunted by the George Floyd murder, which occurred in Minneapolis; they wrestle with generations of racism against Black and Indigenous Americans. Erdrich’s love for bookselling is clear, as is her complicated affection for Minneapolis and the people who fight to overcome institutional hatred and racism.

A novel that reckons with ghosts—of both specific people and also the shadows resulting from America’s violent, dark habits.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE

Fernández, Nona Trans. by Natasha Wimmer Graywolf (192 pp.) $16.00 paper | March 16, 2021 978-1-64445-047-5

Chilean actor and novelist Fernández continues her project of lifting the veil on the dark years of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. As in Fernández’s previous novel, Space Invaders (2019)—note the two pop-culture titles—the story moves about in great leaps from decade to decade. It opens in 1984, when a man enters the Santiago office of a magazine and asks to speak to the author of a story that centers on him. “Andrés Antonio Valenzuela Morales, Soldier First Class, ID #39432, district of La Ligua,” wants to speak about what he has done on behalf of the regime, “about making people disappear.” He has a dossier running page after page, giving names, recounting how they were tortured, his victims now denizens of “some parallel reality” that suggests to the narrator an extended episode of the old creature-feature series The Twilight Zone. A quarter-century passes, and now the narrator encounters the killer again, this time as she is writing a television series about the era, one of the characters based on him. He recounts watching the protest marches by the mothers of los desaparecidos, who hoist poster-sized photographs of their loved ones: “They don’t realize that I know where that person is,” he says, “I know what happened to him.” Enumerating the victims is a process that absorbs both characters, moving between past and present, when the state-sponsored murderer escapes to rural France: “Will he be able to change the shadows of things to come? He wants to believe he will, that he

has the right to a change of skin.” Fernández’s story has shades of the cat-and-mouse mystery, her touchstones emblems of mass global culture: episodes of The Twilight Zone, to be sure, but also old movies and, of course, the video games of the era: “On the same television screen where we used to play Space Invaders, we now saw the national police agents responsible for the murders.”

Fernández is emerging as a major voice in South American letters, and this slender but rich story shows why.

CROSSROADS

Franzen, Jonathan Farrar, Straus and Giroux (592 pp.) $30.00 | Oct. 5, 2021 978-0-374-18117-8

This first novel in an ambitious trilogy tracks a suburban Chicago family in a time of personal and societal turmoil. It says a lot that, at almost 600 pages, Franzen’s latest novel, set amid the waning years of the Vietnam War, leaves you wanting more. That it does so is also very good news: It’s the first in what promises to be a sprawling trilogy, continuing to the present day, which the author has titled A Key to All Mythologies in what is presumably a wink at its far-from-modest ambitions—yes, à la Middlemarch. That reference is classic Franzen, who imbues his books with big ideas, in this case about responsibility to family, self, God, country, and one’s fellow man, among other matters, all the while digging deep into his characters’ emotions, experiences, desires, and doubts in a way that will please readers seeking to connect to books heart-first. Here, the story follows two generations of the Hildebrandt family, headed by Russ, the associate pastor of a church in the fictional town of New Prospect, Illinois, who, when we first meet him in the leadup to Christmas 1971, is nursing a crush on a recently widowed parishioner and a grudge against the groovily charismatic leader of the church’s popular youth group, Crossroads, in which three of Russ’ four children are variously involved. Russ’ wife, Marion, who has gained weight over the years and lost her pre-maternal intensity and with it her husband’s sexual interest, is nursing a few secret preoccupations of her own, as are the couple’s three oldest children, Clem, Becky, and Perry. Each of the five characters, among whose perspectives Franzen adroitly toggles, is struggling with matters of morality and integrity, privilege and purpose, driven in part by the dueling desires for independence and connection. Their internal battles—to fight in an unjust war or unjustly let others fight in your stead, to fight their way out of a marriage or fight to stay in it, to fight for sanity or surrender to madness, to fight to define themselves and determine their paths or to cede that control to others, to name a few—are set against the backdrop of an era in which “love” is everywhere but empathy is in short supply, where hugs are liberally dispensed but real connection’s harder to come by.

Franzen’s intensely absorbing novel is amusing, excruciating, and at times unexpectedly uplifting—in a word, exquisite.

INFINITE

Freeman, Brian Thomas & Mercer (336 pp.) $24.95 | March 1, 2021 978-1-5420-2386-3

Even fans used to the wild inventions of Freeman’s thrillers, such as Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Evolution (2020), had better buckle their seat belts for this traversal of a troubled man’s alternate identities. As if it weren’t enough to lose his wife, realtor Karly Chance, to a car accident he swam away from, Chicago hotel events manager Dylan Moran is jolted even more by seeing his double watching him from the riverbank. After he spots another version of himself wearing the bloodstained jacket his father had worn when he shot Dylan’s mother and himself and he learns that construction worker Scotty Ryan, the one-night stand Karly had been desperately trying to apologize for when she died, has been stabbed to death, he reaches out to psychiatrist Eve Brier, a stranger who’s giving a lecture at his hotel and yet insists that he’s been seeing her professionally since the death of his best friend, Roscoe Tate, in another car crash that introduced Dylan to Karly in the first place. The doubles, Eve assures him, are real enough: alternate versions of himself living alternate lives in alternate worlds that have intersected with his own. Under her direction, Dylan allows himself to be injected with a cocktail of hallucinogens that sends him rocketing into first one of those worlds, then another, determined to neutralize the most dangerous of the doppelgängers, a serial killer who’s already murdered four Karly look-alikes. Each world offers him new possibilities for reversing his mistakes but also new pains, new griefs, and a deepening sense of estrangement, not only from Dylans leading increasingly nightmarish versions of his life, but from the life he thought was his.

This cockeyed, suspenseful exploration of roads not taken is a dizzying delight.

THE FREE BASTARDS

French, Jonathan Del Rey (560 pp.) $28.00 | Sept. 21, 2021 978-0-593-15668-1

The rip-roaring, shelf-bending conclusion to French’s Lot Lands trilogy— following The Grey Bastards (2018) and The True Bastards (2019)—follows a group of badass, war pig–riding half-orcs as they attempt to end a bloody war with humans (known as “frails”) and finally liberate themselves and their lands. It’s nothing short of an adventure fantasy masterwork.

With the giant thrice-blood Oats (born of an orc and a halforc) as the focal character, the story leaves virtual burn marks on the narrative pavement from the action-packed, adrenaline-fueled opening sequence, in which Oats is involved in an

“Dazzling in its humor, intelligence, and the richness of its created world.”

everyone knows your mother is a witch

audacious mission to free some hoofmates from a frail prison and a subsequent battle in which they’re surrounded by enemies atop a mountain of skulls. The action and intensity only increase from there as Oats, Fetching (the hoof’s legendary female chief), Jackal, Polecat, Sluggard, Anvil, and the rest of the band of mongrel orcs maneuver through a gauntlet of adversaries, including invading frail armies, scheming wizards, and god-touched warriors. French’s expert worldbuilding creates a virtual wonderland for fantasy fans, inhabited by half-orcs riding massive war hogs across a sprawling wasteland, giants, cyclopes, monstrous birds of prey, and marauding centaurs. But the real power here is in the author’s ability to bring these fantastical beings to life, with character development so deep and insightful that readers will find themselves emotionally connected not only to the main characters, but to a host of supporting players as well, including Muro, an orphan boy Oats befriends, and even Oats’ giant war pig, Ugfuck. Oats’ poignant journey of self-discovery, in particular, will have more than a few readers weeping by novel’s end.

One of the most original fantasy sagas to come along in years; like Tolkien on a bender.

EVERYONE KNOWS YOUR MOTHER IS A WITCH

Galchen, Rivka Farrar, Straus and Giroux (288 pp.) $26.00 | June 8, 2021 978-0-374-28046-8

A 17th-century German witch hunt—really. Katharina Kepler is an old woman when she is accused, by the wife of the town’s third-rate glazier, of being a witch. She laughs at the accusation. She has three grown children and a cow named Chamomile. She has a life to live. The accusation, unfortunately, seems to stick, with townspeople emerging, as it were, from the woodwork: A young girl once felt a pain in her arm as Katharina walked by; the schoolmaster once felt a pain in his leg. What one character calls “the destructive power of rumor” gathers momentum—gradually, and then all at once. Galchen’s latest book, which is by turns witty, sly, moving, and sharp, is a marvel to behold. Set in the early 1600s and based on real events—Katharina Kepler was Johannes Kepler’s mother, who really was tried as a witch—the novel also speaks to our own time in its hints at the apparent malleability of truth. “If only I had understood earlier what was really true,” someone says. “It can be so difficult to tell, the way people talk.” Galchen’s story will, by necessity, remind many readers of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, but by focusing her narrative on an old woman rather than a cast of attractive young girls, she’s made her mission a far sneakier one. Then, too, Galchen’s prose can sparkle and sting with wit. Katharina’s neighbor thinks, “In order to avoid turning people into monsters by suspecting them of being monsters, I do my best to keep myself mostly to myself.” There is so much in this novel to consider—the degree to which we make monsters of one another, the way that old age can make of femininity an apparently terrifying, otherworldly thing—but it is also, at every step along the way, an entirely delicious book.

Dazzling in its humor, intelligence, and the richness of its created world.

MONKEY BOY

Goldman, Francisco Grove (336 pp.) $27.00 | May 4, 2021 978-0-8021-5767-6

During a five-day visit to his hometown of Boston, a writer attempts to fit together the pieces of his own past, his mother’s, and that of her native Guatemala. “I wish I could remember every single second of my entire life so far, in full 3-D Technicolor and surround sound, and at every past scene re-inhabit myself exactly as I was.” This is the yearning of Francisco Goldberg, Goldman’s fictional alter ego in an autobiographical novel that touches on some of the same ground as his magical, prizewinning debut, The Long Night of White Chickens (1992). Frankie, as he was called in his youth (along with Monkey Boy and other unpleasantries), has returned to Boston to have dinner with a high school girlfriend, occasioning an avalanche of memories of his classmates’ racism, his father’s violence, and his breach with his only sister but also sweeter recollections of his relationships with the series of young Guatemalan women who were sent by his Abuelita to help his mother around the house. He arranges to meet with two of them and pays several visits to his mother at her nursing home, a tin of her favorite French butter cookies in hand. They play a very lenient bilingual version of Scrabble as he wheedles out long-missing details about her ancestry, her marriage, other men in her past. His Mamita may not have the memory she once did, but that’s not the only reason she hesitates. She’s read that first novel of his, too. “This is why I never want to tell you anything, because you take just a little thread of truth and pull on it and out comes a made-up story.” Goldman’s—or Goldberg’s?—immersive, restless narrative style expertly plays the rhythms of thought and remembrance, weaving in his past and current romances, his investigation of and published work on Guatemalan terror, ultimately the quest for a whole made of so many halves: half Jewish, half Catholic, half American, half Guatemalan, half White, half Latino....

The warmth and humanity of Goldman’s storytelling are impossible to resist.

special issue: best books of 2021