Jane Smiley
Rothschild, Matthew
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW by Matthew Rothschild Jane Smiley Jane Smiley is one of the leading novelists of our day. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction back in 1992 for A Thousand Acres, a...
...But it's just so much fun you can't even believe how much fun it is...
...It only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom...
...Q: In one of your postings, you wrote: "The Right is a constant and the Left is intermittent...
...She wants to investigate them, and she wants them to come to a resolution...
...If they get away with it, in the small or in the large, then they'll be encouraged by that, and they will move the indicator toward lawlessness as a general feature...
...You just have to make it idiosyncratic...
...What do you do...
...It's not erotic...
...Are you Jane...
...I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh...
...Another woman exclaimed how fun the riding lessons were that they had taken the day before...
...I flew out to California to interview Smiley on August 14...
...Instead, we had an ignoramus, whose own psychology was very iffy...
...What's your name...
...That was the greatest thing for me about writing that book...
...they produce food...
...I think literature is really interesting right now...
...Things pass...
...What kind of magazine is it...
...I'd love to put it on your blog...
...You cannot be an egomaniac on the horse...
...Smiley: It's really much more intimidating than anything having to do with literature...
...Smiley, who also has written a biography of Charles Dickens, champions fiction in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, and then she takes a look at 100 of them...
...they organize themselves in terms of law...
...Jane Smiley: I had written a piece right around the time of Katrina...
...Art doesn't exist if you just do what you're told...
...Q: What do you say to people who claim, "There's not enough time...
...Every novel deals with social problems...
...it's possessed by the reader...
...Rather than simply riding the wave of outrage, I had to actually cast about for something to write about...
...And you tighten the noose...
...Q: There's a lot of sex in Ten Days in the Hills...
...They clearly intended to win by intimidation...
...Smiley: Yeah...
...She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction back in 1992 for A Thousand Acres, a harrowing retelling of the King Lear story from the standpoint of the sisters, who have to contend with a father who raped them in their teens and bullied them all their lives...
...But she's not playing with the form the way James and other male novelists came to do...
...For the last couple of years, Smiley has written a blog for Huffington Post, where she has cut loose with attacks against the Bush Administration, guns, religion, and Democratic cowardice...
...Smiley: You still got to do it...
...I said, "Actually, Arianna, I have a piece...
...For all her fame, she seemed eager to talk about politics and novels, and her demeanor was jovial and down to earth...
...It can't help it because the protagonist must come in conflict with his group...
...So, I couldn't be a reliable pundit...
...Q: How so...
...I went back to being a total neophyte...
...Arianna is an incredibly well-mannered person, and when she sat down, she said, "Who are you...
...So in every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects...
...So I was not in sympathy with them...
...It was a great game...
...Smiley: The biggest fear of the anonymous posters on Huffington Post is that they'll suspend the elections and declare martial law...
...I told her I was a novelist...
...Generating something once a week was a little taxing for me...
...Four of them are about conformity, and in these, everything would go more smoothly if people just would shut up and do what they're told...
...They're all too old or too young...
...That was Henry James's point of view...
...But I didn't want that...
...We first saw it in the election controversy in 2000...
...And because she's really smart, she can investigate them in a really intelligent way, and she can use a lot of big words, so the men will let her into the club...
...The erotic scenes were not erotic...
...And here's the main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer...
...She took a break from the blog in May, and has returned to it a couple of times since...
...That's when I said, uh-oh...
...I wasn't even pretending to be one...
...She had no idea who I was...
...I don't think so...
...If you lose your temper and start beating him, either you will destroy him, or he will destroy you...
...She's written ten other novels, including Moo and her most recent, Ten Days in the Hills, which takes place in Hollywood, starting with the day George Bush launched the Iraq War...
...She said: "Women of all kinds, and Jewish men...
...How is that...
...If you have an Administration that openly disdains the rule of law, they're disdaining it because they've committed crimes...
...Inevitably, that excludes women...
...Q: You have a name for this: the "try-and-stop-me" conservatism...
...We were going to talk in her home, but she was having a new roof put on, so we went into town and sat in a coffee shop for two and a half hours...
...The novel is by nature anarchic, so the novel fits the world we live in...
...On a cloudless morning in Carmel Valley, I pulled up to her place near Story Road, up a steep hill...
...After getting an affirmative response, she continued: "How are your horses...
...That's everybody's biggest fear...
...The rise of women's book groups means that books are selling whether someone at The New York Review of Books likes them or not...
...Smiley: I don't have a bias against them, per se...
...Q: You seem to have a bias against novels like Ulysses that are so highly constructed that they seem to be geared to an aristocratic reading audience...
...And as he said the words, he told himself, "Oh yeah, that's how I feel, that's what I think...
...The thing that those novelists are always saying about themselves is, "This is true art...
...Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive...
...Q: Was writing the blog distracting...
...In the old days, there was a defined, status-giving elite: intellectuals in New York City...
...I spent part of my college years in a Marxist commune...
...And one man asked her right away about the possibility of Al Gore getting into the Presidential race...
...And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group...
...Q: What's with your fascination with horses...
...When I had horses at the racetrack, I would wake up in terror in a way that I would never wake up while working on a novel...
...And all those others are just commerce...
...Q: Do you race horses, too...
...My boyfriend was in the Harvard-Yale SDS, which was allied with the Progressive Labor Party...
...I was a Marxist-in-law...
...These are standard American ways...
...That's a bold move, even for Scalia and Thomas...
...Q. How did you get started writing for Huff-• ington Post...
...Smiley: Yes, I think so...
...Q: What's behind the rise of women's book groups...
...Smiley is also an avid horsewoman...
...Why should it be...
...And Bush never felt comfortable with the way his dad thought or did things...
...Otherwise, the reader will just say, "This makes no sense," and will put it away...
...As soon as you start riding horses seriously, you're being disciplined on a daily basis about how ignorant you are and what there is left for you to learn...
...It's a diversion...
...How hard is it to write about sex...
...I don't know...
...Bush was a person with a lot of inchoate ideas...
...Either you feel great and the horse isn't responding, or the horse is doing great and you're doing great with him but he dies...
...It became a major criterion in the late twentieth century, but times change...
...Last time I was on a Nation cruise, one of the women I met was a Jungian psychotherapist from L.A...
...I asked, just out of curiosity, "What's the demographic of your clientele...
...And that's the demographic of novel readers because those are the people who are introspective, with a few Midwestern men thrown in, reluctantly...
...What Michael Gerson and his other speechwriters did was they took his feelings and gave them eloquent expression...
...I was not a Marxist...
...he asked...
...Will they actually do that...
...This year, I kept writing until the end of May, but then I had to go back to being a full-time novelist...
...Start with the people around him...
...I told her my name...
...Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community, but we don't really want to be in the Communist Party, either...
...And so I sent her the piece and started writing for her...
...Only as people become more sophisticated in their thinking and more educated do they realize that taking what others have just because you can is actually inhumane and immoral and unethical...
...You have to have a strong comprehension of your characters, and write it from their point of view...
...The Right, however, has a lot of tradition on its side: the tradition of vigilantism, the tradition of arms-bearing, the tradition of racism, the tradition of don't tread on me, the tradition of ruthless exploitation of the natural world...
...Smiley: There are five things that societies do: They reproduce...
...they organize themselves in terms of belief...
...I sent it to the L.A...
...When one guy got a low draft number and we were talking about whether he was going to do his work in the army, I was the only person who said, "Well, what does he want to do...
...Smiley's fourteen-year-old son came by, and I offered him a copy of The Progressive...
...Q: Where does this spiral go...
...Horses constantly reduce your ego...
...When her lover says, "I want to fuck," she says, "Stop the war...
...Times, and they weren't interested, so I put it away...
...Greg Palast has shown that they intended to steal the Florida vote...
...We don't mind a little income redistribution through progressive taxation...
...But it so happened my partner and I were going on the Nation cruise as paid customers, and Arianna was on the cruise...
...Q: In one of your Huffington Post columns, you wrote that Bush is not only the worst President, but the worst possible President...
...And it also so happened that I was seated at her table...
...She said, "Oh, what have you written...
...And now they're on a spiral...
...But in art it doesn't work that way...
...They form a subgroup, though...
...So the author has to offer an analysis of how the group and the protagonist fit...
...And I'm a natural novelist...
...Q: Is that a thrill...
...Compile a dossier of lawbreaking...
...and they make art...
...I wanted the guy to think, "Oh, I could do that, but I'd rather read on past the climax just to see what was happening in the real climax, which is the literary climax rather than the sexual climax...
...Smiley: The Left in America is constrained by the Constitution, and the left edge of the Constitution isn't very far left...
...And there's no glass ceiling...
...But do we really want to live on the collective farm...
...Well, is the only criterion for novelistic greatness that you play with the form...
...So, it's like they're saying to themselves, "Well, I didn't get to be a bestseller, so I get to be art...
...Smiley: I can't say it was distracting, but it was time-consuming...
...Smiley: Because the actual dynamics of relationships interest them...
...So I made sure her seat was next to mine...
...Smiley: I love to write about sex...
...She put me on one of the weekly slots— Tuesday, I think it was...
...Q: You write in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel that all novels are liberal, and all novels are political...
...She's clearly interested in the ins and outs of relationships...
...Let's take George Eliot as our paradigm of a woman writer...
...She owns, rides, and trains them, and she writes about them, too, in Horse Heaven...
...I was always asking inappropriate questions...
...I don't care if it's a diversion...
...And the great thing is that the fun gets greater as you get better...
...When you're writing erotica or pornography, the whole point is to have them throw the book aside and masturbate...
...Smiley: I don't race horses now...
...When I told him it was about politics, he dashed away...
...So for me, that was tremendously fun...
...Even the rightwing Supreme Court justices were emboldened to step out of their costumes as justices and to don their costumes as partisans...
...In this novel, Smiley's politics ring clear, as her protagonist, Elena, assails the Iraq War...
...Cheney divined that, and he moved into the psychological spot of the authority figure, and then he manipulated Bush to be like him rather than Bush's dad...
...Ari-anna was a little late...
...But I hope to race one again...
...Her partner, Jack, also stopped by a couple of times during our expansive conversation...
...What do you mean by that...
...And they just keep reading books...
...Smiley: When my son was ten months old, I went back to horses...
...But she instantly became attentive when I told her I'd won the Pulitzer Prize, and she asked me if I'd ever considered writing a blog...
...Standing at six-feet-two, and wearing a straw hat, Smiley was instantly recognizable by many people in the shop—but not for being a novelist...
...one woman asked...
...The whole idea that his desire would even be a material consideration was discounted...
...Smiley: Women love to read books...
...It's really fun...
...Smiley: At that particular point in history in 2001, what we needed was a person with wide-ranging interests and knowledge, who could have had a strategy and a vision for how to move the country and the world through a dangerous period...
...Bush's speechwriters enabled him to modify his thought system to be much more full of conviction than he was when he started...
...Q: You write that we should "investigate, impeach, indict, and imprison" Bush...
...But publishing has burst out of that in almost every way...
Vol. 71 • December 2007 • No. 12
