Notes from the National Book Festival
It’s become a running joke in my house over the years – my expressed desire to attend the National Book Festival and the impediments to doing so that seem to occur every year. . .for decades. But this year, I finally made it! My husband and I headed via Metro down to the Convention Center, a behemoth set of buildings both large enough to house the various presentations and activities and to be problematic in terms of getting from one space to another in time. The number of attendees was astounding and it was heart-warming to know there were so many people interested in books. Parents with small children congregated on the basement level where there were children’s book authors and activities specifically designed for the young and restless. Otherwise, my husband joked it looked like an English teachers’ in-service: 2/3 middle-aged, plump white women. As a man, he definitely had company but was certainly in the minority.
Prior to going, I had carefully studied the menu and created my own schedule beginning at noon and ending at 8 p.m. Most sessions began on the hour and ran 45-50 minutes with minimal time to run to the next venue in between. We soon learned that the ambitious schedule wasn’t going to work. My husband had hoped to get in to hear Ruth Bader Ginsburg at 11:30. Checking the festival updates at 10:15 on the train, we learned the session was already full. The Washington Postreported the next day that people began lining up as early as 3 a.m. We located the room for the 12:00 presentation by Sigrid Nunez, the author of the 2018 National Book Award-winningThe Friendand an upcoming selection by my book club. Event volunteers encouraged us to go in during the previous session to insure a seat for the one we wanted. We caught the last 15 minutes of a discussion about fiction based on historical people and events. One writer, Roxana Robinson claimed she made nothing up in Dawson’s Fall, her novel based on the story of her great grandparents, but she did include dialogue. . .hmmm. Louis Bayard, author of Courting Mr. Lincoln, readily conceded that he made up scenes in order to tell a story.
Sigrid Nunez began by discussing her writing process in response to a question by the interviewer. She doesn’t write from outlines but rather starts from an image, an idea, or a character. The Friendbegan when she was asked to prepare 10 minutes for a reading at Boston University where she teaches, so she penned what was the first five pages of this novel. The idea arose because she was thinking about a number of people she knew who had thought about suicide. Not long afterwards, the University of Maryland invited her to do a 25-minute reading, so she added on to what she had written earlier and then realized that she was on her way to a novel. Her main character who tells the story researches suicide after a friend kills himself. One of the known indicators of suicide is writing in first person, Nunez shares and the audience laughs. The character who commits suicide is “a very recognizable type – the womanizing professor who is completely oblivious to changing paradigms”. When several of his female students start a petition to get him to stop calling them “dear,” he doesn’t understand how or why that makes students uncomfortable. The narrator, a former student and mentee of his and now a friend, sides with his students and he accuses her of hypocrisy, reminding her that she liked it when he did it to her (decades earlier). Nunez says, “Things have changed. Thank goodness!” She decided her book is, at least in part, about what happens to someone when they don’t understand change.
The interviewer asked Nunez if she had memorable mentors at Bard and Columbia. Nunez laughs as she describes Elizabeth Hardwick (a novelist and literary critic who was married to Robert Lowell), with whom she took two workshops. She remembers Hardwick saying to a student, “I tried to read your story, I really did, but it was so boring,” and to Nunez, “I see the mark of an amateur on every page.” The audience howls at this.
The only character in The Friend with a name is the Great Dane, Apollo, whom the narrator adopts after the professor dies. As a high school teacher, when we studied books in which characters went unnamed, I always suggested that there was an intentionality to it, that the writer was trying to communicate something perhaps metaphoric. Jose Saramago’s Blindnessis a perfect example of this. I was, therefore, surprised when Nunez said that she originally wrote the book with character names but came to feel like something wasn’t working, that the names made it less fluid, so she took them out. When she took the names out, the book was better. Huh.
Nunez credits her desire to become a writer with being an avid reader. She loved being read to as a child. “It’s a terrific escape, borrowing somebody else’s consciousness for a while.” She mentioned that recently she and her colleagues are seeing more students who want to be writers but who have no interest in reading. “It’s a huge mystery to me.” Me too, but when my husband and I discussed it afterwards, he suggested that perhaps they are more interested in writing for television, film or the Internet. As a reader, her tastes, her “favorites”, have changed over time. She says she no longer has favorites, that her tastes are broad, but she did recommend two titles that she recently read: The Grammariansby Cathleen Schine and Trust Exercise by Susan Choi.
Julia Alvarez
After stepping out for lunch, we realized that we were never going to make the 2:00 presentation by Ann Beattie and then the 3:00 interview with Julia Alvarez, so we opted, once again, to sit through part of a presentation on poetry and place prior to hearing Alvarez – a good thing since the room was very full. I remember Alvarez’s first book, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent. Published in 1991, it tells the story of four sisters who, along with their parents, flee the Dominican Republic in the 1960’s after their father has taken part in an unsuccessful coup attempt. The book, told in reverse chronological order, somewhat mirrors Alvarez’s own experience when her father dared to speak up against the brutal dictator, Trujillo, and her family likewise fled. Alvarez has been asked here today on the 25thanniversary of her second novel, In theTime of the Butterflies, a work of historical fiction that tells the story of the four Mirabel sisters who took part in a successful underground revolution to unseat Trujillo after 31 years of power. The Mirabels were known as “the Mariposa,” Spanish for butterflies, hence the title. The book is taught in classrooms around the country and is frequently chosen as the “one read” by cities, colleges and festivals.
Alvarez was interviewed by Marie Arana, another Latina author and frequent book reviewer for The Washington Post. Arana began by asking why Alvarez thinks the book is still relevant. Alvarez, thoughtful and measured in her response, points out the refugee crisis in our country, a situation she says that was created by politics. “I understand that sense of desperation that drives people from their homelands. It is a continuing saga.” She references and recommends several times a book called Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilitiesby Rebecca Solnit, which talks about “the indirectness of direct action,” the difference that people can make even when they think something has been unsuccessful. Alvarez connects this to Butterfliesby saying she is interested in “what politicizes people, what causes people to stand up, what’s the last straw?” She laughs wryly. “These are very important questions right now.”
Alvarez cites Chekhov who, she says, stated that “the task of the writer is not to solve the problem but rather to state it correctly.” She feels like writing the story of the Mirabels as a novel provides the nuances. Each of the sisters stands up for a different reason.
Like Nunez, Alvarez credits her passion for reading as the inspiration for becoming a writer. A memorable book? Arana asks. The first book to garb her was The Arabian Nights. “It gave me the idea that stories have power. They can change you.” She laughingly says she dreams of a Scheherazade who goes to the White House and tells DJT, whom she refers to as “the sultan,” stories every night that will both distract from his idiocy and eventually win him over to reason. As an adult writer, Alvarez talks about the impact of reading Maxine Hong Kinston’s The Woman Warrior. “That was about myfamily,” she says. “Every Latina could start her book with the first line from that book: ‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you.’” The audience laughs appreciatively. “From this book,” Alvarez said she learned, “you can speak in terms of history and mythology and the immigrant experience.” She credits it with changing mainstream American literature.
Alvarez has a new novel coming out next year, The Afterlife. She says that her publisher didn’t like her working title because it implied religion and death, but one of the perks of becoming successful, is that you can choose your own titles. No hint as to what the book is about other that it is “a short, lyrical novel,” influenced by her love of poetic language.
Our schedule had included Barbara Kingsolver at 6 and a panel on “The Enduring Appeal of the Odyssey” at 7, but, honestly, we were on overload by 4 and decided to – as our good friend Ed says, leave the party while we were still having fun. I’m glad we went; listening to writers always makes me want to write and, of course, read even more.
