Progressive Book Club asked novelist Stewart O'Nan and Maureen Corrigan, Book Critic for Fresh Air with Terry Gross (and a PBC editorial board member) to discuss O'Nan's latest book, Last Night at the Lobster.

Over the next few days we'll publish their email discussion, which took place over the course of a week in May.

From: Stewart O'Nan
To: Maureen Corrigan
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2008


Dear Maureen,
 
See if you can find an old hardback of So Long, See You Tomorrow from your library.  That's the ideal format to read Mr. Maxwell's finest.  Also try Time Will Darken It and They Came Like Swallows when you have more time.
 
Dennis Lehane's got a great historical novel on the way--The Given Day, about the Boston Policeman's strike.
 
I'd love to have the whole world--or all of Oprah's readers--meet Manny,but finally the ideal audience for my novels is one person.  One reader to whom the book means something, and, depending on the book, something deep and personal.  That's what I love about reading.  It's a private, intimate act, one mind and heart meeting a world fashioned by another, always comparing your experience to the characters'. My hope is that my books will live long enough on library shelves to find their ideal readers, and that they'll somehow keep my characters and their worlds alive.
 
Thanks again for helping Manny and for helping me.  Hope all's well.
 
Yrs ever,
 
Stewart
 

From: Maureen Corrigan
To: Stewart O'Nan
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2008


Hi Stewart,

You've mentioned Maxwell a couple of times now--I'll have to make room to read him this summer.  (I think The Library of Congress brought out a new edition of his work recently.)

I will try to channel some of your optimism about literary culture in America but I don't feel it.  Yes, great books are being written all the time.  But I get over 100 new books delivered to my house a week (sent by publishers hoping for a review on Fresh Air) and there is so much coldly calculated nonsense being published--endless rewrites of Marley and Me and The DaVinci Code or whatever the hot bestseller of the moment is.  And, while is great that Jhumpa Lahiri's terrific story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, just made #1 on The New York Times fiction list, the fact that she did so is news because that place is usually occupied by thrillers or chic lit.

I read and enjoy all of those kinds of stories and, sure, some of them--especially the mystery/suspense tales--make it into the category of "Literature": George Pelicanos and Fred Vargas and Dennis Lehane to name but a few of the contemporary great crime writers. But, I think, there's way too much mind candy out there competing for a declining readership.  The 2004 NEA study, "Reading at Risk," was really blunt in its assessment of the current scene:  a 28% decline in reading fiction among readers in their teens and twenties; a 10% point drop in reading literature across the board over the past decade--resulting in the loss of 20 million potential readers.  The book groups that are flourishing and Oprah (who's got to be given credit for preaching to the wonders of reading when so few other public figures do) tend to gravitate toward middlebrow novels about female-friendship-tragedy-and-ultimate survival (since women are the major market for fiction.)  Again, that's fine but not as a steady diet.
Some of the on-line book review sites are thought-provoking, but a lot of the comments on Amazon and other book chat sites that I've checked out tend to be of the "Jane Eyre reminds me of my best friend's sister" genre that characterize a sluggish day in my English 101 course.  Give me a John Leonard or a James Wood anyday--critics who know their stuff.  I may not always agree with them, but they challenge me to think more rigorously about my own responses and, undemocratic as it sounds, I don't think you get responses of that caliber on on-line sites where anyone can sound off.

I want to read books that entertain and amuse and uplift and challenge me to go beyond my own world and thinking and even customary sentence formation.  You're right that wonderful new writers are emerging every year--that's the thrill of my job to become acquainted with a Susan Choi or, belatedly, a Jane Gardam or a you.  I want there to be more of an audience for the kind of novels all of you write.  I was cheered to read the other day that Obama, on a visit to a Chicago bookstore last month, bought Samantha Powers latest book and also Richard Price's new novel, Lush Life.  (Would Manny be an Obama or a Hillary voter?)  Maybe, with a new president, a new cultural climate will sweep in and being well-read and smart will not be seen, especially for a man, as being "sissy."

Okay, enough H.L. Mencken-like grumbling from me about the decline of Western Civilization. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you. I look forward to reading your next book and to catching up on some of your earlier novels that I haven't yet had the chance to read.

All good wishes,
Maureen


From: Stewart O'Nan
To: Maureen Corrigan
Sent: Sat, 10 May 2008


Dear Maureen,
 
I'm not in love with Woolf's whole body of work, but in To the Lighthouse, she really delivers that world, and how each of her characters feels, their deepest desires and fears, their triumphs and losses.  It's a book I go back to again and again--as did William Maxwell.
 
The Great Gatsby does have that crushing last passage.  And I love how Fitzgerald just makes up a word--orgiastic!--to keep that high-flown rhetoric rolling.  Also a nice example of a small literary novel (217 pages in a small format, with a big font and massive margins) that didn't quite make its way in the contemporary marketplace, though Fitzgerald understood that it was his finest work.  Sometimes it takes a while for readers to catch on.
 
Hope your mother snagged some sugars.  "That's why they they're!"
 
I don't try to outguess the market.  I just try to write a good book (hard enough) and then hope someone will want to read it.  The Lobster's short, but look at I Was Amelia Earhardt or The Butterfly and the Diving Bell (flip the title around if I got it wrong).  I'm a big War and Peace fan, but one of my favorite novels of all-time is William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, which is 135 pages long.  I like writing the short novel.  A Prayer for the Dying was around 140 pages in manuscript, Snow Angels about 200.  I've had a lot of readers compliment the Lobster on its small size, and I'm sure more than a few reviewers were relieved to see it wasn't another tree-killer.
 
I think what we call the literary culture in the U.S. is booming.  Most book groups, from Oprah on down, read primarily literary fiction, or treat the books they're reading as if they were literary fiction, even when they're not.  So maybe it's more correct to say the notion of the literary novel has broadened.  More contemporary fiction is being taught in high schools and universities than ever before.  Book review space has disappeared, it's true, but with sites like amazon and abebooks.com, it's never been easier for people to find and buy literary fiction--not to mention the hundreds literary magazines available on-line (whereas before you'd either have to subscribe or make a trek to, say, the Gotham Book Mart).  And it's never been easier for libraries to interloan literary fiction.  
 
'Do you think contemporary literary fiction has in any way contributed to its own relative unpopularity?'  Well, when you look at a blockbuster like The Corrections, or, say, one of Cormac McCarthy's later bestsellers, you'd have to say literary fiction is doing okay.  The Times list regularly includes Updike and Irving, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Anne Tyler, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Alice McDermott, Joyce Oates, etc., etc.  Sure, most of these are brand names by now, but compare it to the list from, say, 1958 or 1988.  We're also seeing a new generation of American writers just beginning to hit their stride--writers like Aimee Bender and Kevin Brockmeier and Lydia Millet and Susan Choi.  
 
Joyce's snow falling on all the living and the dead definitely was in my mind when I was putting together the Lobster, but so was the snow in A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Mr. Magoo's A Christmas Carol, and even the snow/slush in Bill Murray's Scrooged.  The book is an homage to all of those, and Manny is a mix of Bob Cratchit (sp?) and Charlie Brown, trying to hold on to hope.  And right there's a nice gathering of my influences:  comics, cartoons, TV shows, movies.  I read anything and everything.  Finding a good new book is an inspiration, and there are always more out there.
 
Hope that's useful.  Always a pleasure to talk shop.
 
Yrs ever,
 
Stewart


From: Maureen Corrigan
To: Stewart O'Nan
Date: Friday, May 09, 2008


Dear Stewart,

Sorry to be slow in responding to your thought-provoking post of yesterday.  It's funny to think of Woolf in the same context as you and Alice Munro and William Maxwell, but, of course, you're right that she does try to capture the everyday, the ephemeral.  I just wish she didn't applaud herself so much for doing so.  (I've yet to fall in love with Woolf's fiction.  Every reader has his/her shortcomings.)

I was away from my computer yesterday doing my bit for literature.  DC has adopted The Great Gatsby as its citywide novel for "The Big Read."  (The Big Read is an initiative sponsored by the NEA to try to get Americans reading more literary fiction.  Towns and cities across the land choose a novel and then people gather in libraries and other public places and discuss it.)  All this week, invited readers have been reading aloud chapters of The Great Gatsby in a downtown DC restaurant.  Yesterday, I read aloud the last chapter--which includes the greatest last three paragraphs of any novel, anywhere.  The audience consisted of five people.  One of them was my 88 year old mother who, in the language of Lobster, is one of those "cottonheads" who steals all the sugar packets from restaurant tables.

So, a few questions for you, as a writer of literary fiction, at a time when literary culture seems to be taking a nosedive.  (Witness shrinking young readers according to the NEA's 2005 survey, "Reading at Risk"; shrinking literary fiction sales; shrinking book review pages in newspapers.)

--It seems that in choosing the novella form, you really shunned the issue of "marketability."  I've had readers--intelligent readers!--confess to me that if they're shelling out $24.95 or thereabouts for a new hardcover, they want it to be a fat one so that they get more pages for their bucks.  Did you have any problems with your agent/editors/publishers in terms of the length of Lobster?
--The relatively short length of Lobster certainly intensifies the emotions of the story--as you note in your last post.  What also enhances the atmosphere is the snowfall that gathers strength through the day and into the evening.  I loved the hushed feel that the snowfall created outside the Red Lobster--it was such a contrast to the frenetic pace of the restaurant inside.  Of course, as an English professor, I thought of Joyce's The Dead, another long short story whose power is enhanced by a snowfall.  Any trace of an influence there?  If not, who do you read for inspiration, enjoyment?
--What do you, as a writer of literary fiction, think about the depressing state of reading in America?  Apart from the usual culprits (the internet, video games, etc.) do you think contemporary literary fiction has in any way contributed to its own relative unpopularity?

Thanks,
Maureen

To: Maureen Corrigan
From: Stewart O'Nan
Date: Thursday, May 08, 2008


Dear Maureen,

Framing the everyday compellingly is the challenge--something Chekhov and Alice Munro and William Maxwell and Virginia Woolf, at their best, are so good at.  It sounds like Tressel let his novel sprawl.  In the Lobster, as in Wish You Were Here (which weighs in around 520 pages), we're following characters who are losing a world that's precious to them, so every little thing is energized and meaningful--at least to them.  But I try to write by John Gardner's dictum that if a character is capable of and worthy of love, the reader will follow him or her anywhere.

 

I don't know if every workplace functions as a family, but every workplace is definitely its own society, and the smaller the place, the more intense the relationships.  It's natural that in seeing the same people day-in and day-out you come to know them well.  Some you like, some you don't.  Some become friends, some enemies, and some just pass through.  By making the manager of the Lobster the center of the book--the guy who has to motivate his crew, manage their very different personalities and mediate all disputes--I focus on the bonds (or lack of bonds) between people, and how that influences the degree of loyalty they have to Manny and to their jobs.  I hope that, under the stress of this last night, each reveals his or her true character, for better or worse.  That goes for Manny too.  He's the most loyal of employees and yet he's ambivalent in other, far more important ways.

Thanks, as always,

Stewart 



From: Maureen Corrigan
To: Stewart O'Nan
Date: Thursday, May 8, 2008

Hi Stewart,

I think what you say about the need to make the working class character "kooky" in order to make him/her palatable in fiction is a really smart point.  (It's akin to the way gay characters have to pay their way into network sitcoms by being "zany.")  In those 19th century British novels about work I mentioned in my earlier e-mail, the working class characters always had to be "exceptions," too (Jude the Obscure was an intellectual-in-the-rough; factory girl Mary Barton was a knock-out.)  I once taught Robert Tressel's turn-of-the-century novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in a class on fiction about work (never again!).  It's one of those books that's much more fun to talk about than to read because Tressel's aim was to follow the mundane lives of a bunch of non-zany house painters:  they spackle, they mix paints, they stop for a lunch of bread and beer, they talk about the weather, they paint, they go home, go to sleep, wake up, and go to work again.  For 800 plus pages.  Tressel captured the texture of an ordinary workday but, unlike you, he stumbled when it came to plot and character development.

Manny, by the way, is a wonderful character--a guy with integrity, who's flawed. (For those who haven't read Last Night at the Lobster yet, Manny DeLeon is the manager of the restaurant that's closing.) You'd want Manny next to you in a foxhole, but (this is me speaking) you wouldn't necessarily want to be married to him.  You capture his essential decency without making a big deal about it.  And, the other thing you capture in an understated way is how Manny and the crew he has working with him on this last day of operations at The Red Lobster have become something of an alternative family.  I don't mean that phrase in the smarmy way that corporate America uses it ("Welcome to the Walmart Family!) but in the sense that people who work with each other day in and day out come to be connected--whether it's through loyalty, dislike, envy, desire--in something of the same way family members are connected.  Want to talk about the idea of the alternate (and diverse) families created by work?

Thanks,
Maureen


From: Stewart O'Nan
To: Maureen Corrigan
Date: Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Dear Maureen,

Thanks.  Having reviewed my share of books, I'd say it's hard work, and for not much pay.  For every book you love, there are dozens you don't truly care for but you still have to be responsible in your criticism, letting the reader know what they're in for as well as taking into account the fact that the author may have dedicated years of his or her life to it.  Not easy.

I can't speak for other writers, but I'm always very aware of what my characters do for work.  Blame it on my Pittsburgh roots, growing up where work is revered and jobs are scarce.  As a reader, I like the author to take me behind the scenes and show me things that I'd never know otherwise.  Privileged information is always fascinating, whether it's about working at the Red Lobster or at the airport slinging bags (Eugene in Everyday People) or on a town roadcrew (Patty in The Good Wife) or at a gas mart (Marjorie in the Speed Queen) or driving a Wonder bread truck (Larry in The Names of the Dead).  Every workplace is a world with its own rules and language and drama, and for whatever reason, as Americans we often define ourselves by what we do.  It's the first question we ask in a social setting, not, as in other cultures, "Where are you from?" or "Who are your people?"  Maybe it's because, without a fully rigid caste system, Americans are working every day to create who they are or who they want to be. Gatsby without the glitter. 

The challenge is to get the reader to take these everyday workplaces and the people who work there seriously.  In the mainstream media, fast food or casual dining chains are objects of whacky satire, staffed by incompetents who don't care, so you have to overcome that prejudice.  That's an opportunity, actually, since you're giving the reader a new and almost radical perspective, the way Manny loves and mourns the Lobster.  There are also readers out there who consider anyone who works in these places a loser, or don't consider any blue-collar person interesting unless they have some freakish talent that sets them apart (the Good Will Hunting effect).  At its best, fiction lets the reader know how it feels to be someone else.  I'd like to think readers still have empathy for regular folks trying their best in a tough situation, even if those folks are generally invisible or taken for granted, like Manny.  Because there are millions and millions of people out there in the same situation.  We can't all be quirky and glamorous.   

Hope that's a decent start.  Thanks again.

Yours ever,
Stewart


From: Maureen Corrigan
To: Stewart O'Nan
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008

 Dear Stewart,

Nothing kind or generous about my review.  It's such a thrill when I get to sing the praises of a wonderful book that I know NPR listeners might not hear about otherwise.  Those are the times when I think, "Wow, I get paid for this?" (Don't tell Fresh Air.  Management will get the idea that they can cut corners by making my reviews some kind of non-paid act of love for literature.)

And speaking of getting paid for one's labors, one of the many things I loved about Last Night at the Lobster was the fact that the subject and setting had to do with work.  I've always been interested in the representations of work in fiction and the fact that the subject of work--at least work that involves manual as well as mental labor--really doesn't figure very prominently in the main tradition of British and American literature.  You get all those "problem of England" novels in the 19th century written in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, books like Mary Barton by Mrs. Gaskell and Hard Times by Charles Dickens, and novels about the working class in the twentieth century by The Angry Young Men.  Over on our side of the pond we have some work scenes in Moby Dick and even Little Women and then in the twentieth century those lefty novels by writers like Howard Fast. I could blather on but the point is that I don't think that work--the occupation that absorbs the lives of ordinary men and women--really takes center stage in most fiction.  So, a couple of questions for you, Stewart, as the writer of a terrific novel that has to do with work:  why don't more writers turn their attention to the workplace--especially the bluecollar workplace--and what are the challenges of writing a story about a setting and a job that isn't inherently "sexy"?


From: Stewart O'Nan
To: Maureen Corrigan
Sent: Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Hello Maureen,

Thanks for taking on Last Night at the Lobster. And thank you for your kind and generous review on NPR.  You put the book into readers' hands, and for a writer, that's what it's all about.  Obviously, with my choice of hero and subject matter, I wasn't trying to write a blockbuster, but if just one person picks the book off the shelf at the library and finds that the life in it speaks to him or her, that's everything.  You've made that even more possible, so thanks.