The Last White Man: A Virtual Evening with Mohsin Hamid and Danzy Senna

good evening buena noches and thank you for tuning in i'm christina nosti the events and marketing director at miami's independently owned bookstore books and books and it's my pleasure to welcome you to a virtual evening with mohsin hameed to celebrate the publication of his new novel the last white man a provocative tale that raises questions of racial and social justice and is published by our friends at riverhead books this event would not be possible without the generous participation of our hosts miami book fair and the partnership of our many independent bookstore colleagues throughout the us i don't have time to mention each and every one of them by name but i'll be posting their names and website information in the chat so please check them out and purchase your copy of the last white man from your favorite if you haven't already and be sure to give them some love in the chat mohsin hamid is the author of five novels including the booker prize finalists and new york times bestsellers exit west and the reluctant fundamentalist his essays some collected as discontent and in civilizations have appeared in the new york times the washington post and elsewhere in conversation with mohsin tonight we're joined by danzi senna whose first novel the best-selling caucasia won the stephen crane award for best new fiction and the american library association's alex award was a finalist for the international dublin literary award and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages a recipient of the whiting writers award senna is also the author of the memoir where did you sleep last night the story collection you are free and the novels symptomatic and new people remember to pose your questions for the author in the q a feature at the bottom of the screen and we thank you for supporting independent bookstores and now without further ado i'd like to welcome our guests to the virtual stage hi there melson it's great to be here with you likewise and i'm so excited to talk about your your new book and um [Music] i i would love for you to just read for a minute or two um partly because i just think the tone and the language are so interesting and distinctive and striking and beautiful and um i would love for us to start just hearing you read it sure and and you know thank you christina uh you know for having me and then also to danzi for doing this it's an it's an honor to be in conversation together so um thank you both uh here's here's how the book begins one morning anders a white leg woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown this dawned upon him gradually and then suddenly first has a sense as he reached for his phone that the early light was doing something strange to the color of his forearm subsequently and with a start as a momentary conviction that there was somebody else in bed with him male darker but this terrifying though it was was surely impossible and he was reassured that the other moved as he moved was in fact not a person not a separate person but was just him anders causing a wave of relief for if the idea that someone else was there was only imagined then of course the notion that he had changed color was a trick too optical illusion or a mental artifact born in the slippery halfway place between dreams and wakefulness except that by now he had his phone in his hands and he had reversed the camera and he saw that the face looking back at him was not his at all thank you that's such a an amazing opening and um i found this book so interesting in terms of all of the the choices you made and i think of writing a novel as just a series of these choices we make to do one thing and not another but um what was really you know i wanted to start by asking you about the origins of this idea for this novel um because i've seen that you talk about 9 11 and um and that the book has been gestating for many decades and and sort of being thought about and processed and even written for a very long time and um and i was thinking about between 9 11 and today the world that has changed so dramatically um in that time period for all of us and and especially maybe around questions of power and race and identity um and so i was just interested and this is kind of a novelist question but also a question about history and the world and being a writer at this time like how did you sort of continue to be invested in the idea that began around 9 11 and sort of how did that book grow with you and change over the decades that you thought about it yeah well you know as you know yourself you know when we talk about where a book comes from um we're we're partly just making it up right we don't really know where our books come from but that said you know you have a kind of feeling um that this is sort of you know where things started and and for me uh it was you know in 2001 i was 30 years old and um i had uh had about 18 of those years in in the us and 12 in pakistan and i grew up in this um in these liberal enclaves and i was living in you know these liberal cities bay area in california cambridge massachusetts you know new york city and i'd gone to these sort of elite universities and um had a well-paying job and while i was obviously you know a brown man with a muslim name i um i wouldn't say that discrimination featured so prominently in what i would consider to have been you know the concerns of my life i was aware of it it was sort of there but for the most part um it wasn't something that i spent too much time thinking about and uh and and as i say this i i've actually had conversations about this book in the last week and something has struck me which is that one of my father's friends came to talk in san francisco and he said when you said that you know discrimination didn't feel so prominent in your life he said it was so different from me because in the 50s and 60s um and and 70s it was so so powerfully prominent in his life and another friend of mine brought his son to a talk in houston and this young man was born in 2003 and he's a pakistani american he says you know when you said that i can't believe it because in my whole life it has been such a prominent feature it's surprising you could say this but you know in the 1990s uh um there was a moment um and particularly lived in certain parts of america where it was possible to imagine that things were headed in a sort of different direction that the discrimination was was was waning that if you were outside the sort of white black binary in the united states um you know you you for the most part to get away with things if you were you know if you were had enough money and you um had a certain kind of background class background that you know education gives you that you've gone to certain schools and and then all of a sudden um 911 happens and and that changes for me and suddenly you know at the airport they're pulling you aside or you're on an aircraft on the tarmac and they stop the aircraft and they come on board the aircraft and take you off the aircraft uh when you return to the plane after having been searched again your fellow passengers are less than thrilled to see you you know back accompanied by two security guards or you go into the you know immigration at jfk airport and they take you to a separate room and you wait for three or four hours and they grill you for an hour and then to another room where you have to register and say where your address is going to be and all this strange stuff and it wasn't just official them you know you would get onto a bus a little bit unshaven with a backpack and somebody would get up and you know change their seat and you know with these things you're never quite sure what's going on like is this coincidence am i really imagining this but it was a distinct feeling that you know that i had um lost something and i had this feeling that you know i wanted to go back to how it was before 9 11. um like you know and i thought it would i thought you know this will pass people will get over it but time went by and it didn't go back very quickly uh or at all maybe to what it would have been before and i started to think you know what is this feeling of loss you know what have i lost and i thought that you know maybe what i've lost is a kind of partial whiteness in the sense that i wasn't white but if whiteness means you know just being a human being uh you know presenting yourself without the additional attachment of suspicion or sense of threat um or connotation if it just means you know being you um that i felt i had i had lost and and i thought you know um why do i want this back and what does it mean you know to want it back and and what was i doing when i had this thing that i was like you know complicit in something um should i instead of you know wishing that things were before they were you know before 9 11 should i instead be saying you know what was i doing before 9 11 to be so blind and so in a sense participatory in something that clearly can be turned off in in an instant anyway so these thoughts stayed for a while and i wrote a novel called the reluctant fundamentalist which is more directly dealing with the suspicions between you know muslim background people and people you know from america from the west um um who were from different backgrounds and were suspicious of people with muslim backgrounds and that mutual suspicion but the idea of something about one's identity and how you can imagine yourself to have a particular kind of identity and then have another identity imagined upon you because you haven't changed you're the same person this treatment is happening because other people are now imagining you differently that just stuck with me and and at some point i had the idea of this character who goes to bed one day thinking that he is white um and wakes up the next day uh with dark skin and a world where this begins to happen um and and also i guess around this time a whole bunch of other things had been going on you know in the united states and elsewhere um where sort of white nationalism had had never gone away but had suddenly appeared very prominently and other types of similar you know nationalistic movements in different cultures you know hindutva in india and sort of a kind of muslim version in pakistan and you know turkey russia and so i thought something is going on you know all over the world there's something about people's dominant group suddenly feeling like they're losing their membership in that group and then reasserting their themselves and so and so i thought that time had come to write it and that's really i guess in a very long way you know how i got to how i got to the book that is so interesting um and i sort of was thinking about so many issues in my family and my own identity growing up mixed race and in the united states and um sort of passing as white unwittingly and when you were just talking right now i was thinking how my father who grew up in the jim crow south a black black man in the gym cross south um let's just say that there was a joke growing up like if a black man wants to sit at the front of the bus he just puts on a turbine and that's in the you know 50s and you know like that if you want to be read as neutral you become a foreigner and not a black american and so it's just i love what what you're talking about so much is the fluidity of race and the constructedness of race and how can change depending on these contexts and um how you can go to bed one person and move into a different context and become another and what that does to one's identity is is so fascinating and i think it's interesting you chose to you know what the story you're telling is one you've explored sort of in some ways in some of your other work but um you chose to make it a a place that isn't specified and um the name anders and oona is the white woman who he's involved with and um and you know i'm just interested in that choice to kind of keep it outside of a specific geographical and temporal space yeah well i think um i i've gotten quite attached to the idea that one thing that written fiction can do particularly well is give space you know uh to readers to imagine for themselves um the imagine the book into existence so when you watch a television show or you see a film it looks like the world right but when you you know when you read a book it looks you know it looks like like this yeah and that is nothing like the world it's just these words and these sentences and these you know these punctuation marks and blank pages paper and and you the reader create images and emotions and a sense of what the world is and i thought you know because the reader makes so much of a book um because the reader is i think in a sense um more creative uh than in almost any other storytelling mass storytelling form uh the reader really is doing half the work of a novel yeah um i thought you know i want to give space to the reader so i'm not going to name most of these characters i won't name the place i'm going to keep the story quite brief i will not describe the dialogue things will be said but the exact way in which people speak won't be rendered in great detail um so that you know you have the freedom to imagine some of these interactions and some of this place for yourself and it's interesting because in the u.s already i've encountered you know one person saying you know why did you choose not to set this in the u.s and i told that interviewer i said you know it's funny you say that because the previous interviewer said you know it's obviously set in the u.s why did you choose to make it clear that it was in the u.s and you know and somebody else said it was in south africa and i thought you know it's interesting because um it's up to you in a way where and and that's useful both because of course they're readers outside the united states um and because they're readers all over the world and also because even for readers in the united states your instinct about whether this feels like america or feels like some other place um uh tells you something and yeah so and so like the rorschach test exactly i mean i think i think that um uh inviting a reader to play make-believe which is what a novel does and then giving the reader enough space where what they do might surprise them is for me a fertile thing because you know as adults we so rarely are invited to play in our imaginations we obviously imagine stuff and we do it by ourselves but you know after we grow up we stop often doing things like you know you're a kid and you pretend okay well let's we're both pirates so we're both fairies or we're both astronauts and let's just do that and you can you can pretend and then after you're eight or nine or ten or whatever it is you you stop doing that so much and the time when you do that after that is often you know when you're reading a novel and the writer says let's go into this imaginary place and so um and so yes it's it's um it's to give the reader reader freedom to kind of do what they need to do imaginatively with this around great questions of race and power and identity because it is so important that the reader interrogate their own um presumptions and so kind of practicing that restraint creates a really interesting experience a little bit of anxiety for the reader actually which i like yeah well i i think i think you know one of the things that um that i've felt as somebody who's sort of from outside the typical american racial binary you know to the extent that in america there's there's sort of there's the idea of whiteness there's an idea of blackness um and blackness as an idea was created you know so that there could be white so you could say whiteness was created so there could be blackness but um you know property rights were being asserted and and and you know some people needed to uh in in that system needed to believe that there were people who were property and so therefore you create this thing you know in europe you were you're french or german or whatever but now in america you have this concept of whiteness um now the thing itself is a very unstable imagined construct i mean you know it it's it's not that it's not real in the sense that it operates in a real way once you believe in it um it becomes real when you enact it upon somebody else but you've kind of imagined the thing into his existence you know it's not like a waterfall right or like a planet it just is just there and so i think for the reader as you say um when you're not given i guess enough information to have it fully imagined into existence for you when you're sort of generating a sense of race in the novel from within yourself yeah that is an anxious position like for example what does anders look like when he changes you know what exactly we don't really know we know he looks different and oona thinks he's a different kind of person but what do you imagine that to be um and and so i think yeah i i think that being forced to generate your own imagination of the racial universe of the novel is a very uncomfortable thing but it's also very fertile thing because you know when you do it you realize what you're doing yeah um i i like that idea and and how it sort of the experience of of reading that from that sort of uncertain position um i i feel like replicates some of my own experience in the world of being like ambiguous and the object of those projections um and i also really like what you're saying about the sort of unique experience of the novel versus these other forms of storytelling and um in particular television and film in part because you know i feel i live in la and i feel like i'm like this archaic story of teller and that you know is there really a space for the novel to do something different and to kind of compete with these other forms of storytelling and in the experience of the the person who wants to hear a story um and i read you i read a quote of you talking about that but it was really so reassuring in a way for me as a novelist well i i think it's something that we as novelists can really lean into because you know um when a reader gets to be the casting director and the cinematographer and the director of the novel right and um you know that that involves a certain degree of work so um so in a sense the novel always will be a more frictional art form than cinema and television where you know by its nature you don't slip into it as easily maybe yeah it said um so the the friction means oh well it's not as you know easily um spread or easily entered into and so you can despair and say well my storytelling form it's harder for people to get into it but on the other hand i think that um it's a different thing you know you aren't a viewer of a novel as a reader you are a co-creator of that novel and so and so what the novel lacks in terms of ease of entry it gains in terms of allowing readers to make stuff and and that for me is a really interesting place for us to play yeah it's very exciting and and i do feel that i'm more sort of whole body experience when i read as opposed to watching something so i was glad to have you kind of articulate that um one of the things that's really exciting and sort of fun in a strange way in this novel is you start with this premise of this white man waking up and discovering he's turned dark um and then you know it's sort of like a a pandemic like it begins to spread other people have this experience and i was like this is the nice pandemic like i wish we were in this pandoric and not the one we're really in um but there was uh um i i also just like seeing the sort of situations that you then place him and these other characters in and sort of the sense that like the father of anders and the mother of una are are really grasping and holding on to the idea of whiteness and they're very nostalgic and protective of this idea and horrified to see white people turning dark um and then you know the sense of like feeling threatened by your own body is really interesting um and and sort of then the the reaction of the culture at large felt like very resonant with today like these things are changing they're inevitable you know there's this idea of the global majority of quote-unquote people of color and there's an anxiety around that and the sort of on the idea being replaced or becoming obsolete my mother actually who's very excited about this being she's the last white person in our family and like all her children identified black married people of color and our you know all her grandchildren are non-white and she's you know sort of like great thank god this is um but anyway i was just interested in like this idea of something inevitable happening and then the the sort of reactionary elements that are created by that and you know that's clearly speaking to the world we live in today yeah i mean i think i think you're right that in a sense it's a novel written from in the pandemic um that that pandemic did some strange things but this feeling that reality suddenly got completely turned inside out and you could just stay home for months and schools would be shot and there was no international flights and you know you couldn't believe those things would happen then suddenly they've happened also you know now it's hard to remember but in the initial few weeks it was unclear just how bad this thing was going to get you know was to be some you know real end of things um and obviously millions of people died that god could have got very bad but but there was a possibility that it would be a kind of you know species if not eradicating but like you know on the scale of some of the great illnesses of the past um and in this novel too in a sense it's unclear um how bad it's going to get you know bad in quotes but but for some of the characters how bad it's going to get also um it begins with sort of one person getting this thing or having this thing and then and then a few more and you you it seems in the distance and it comes closer and it um so it is i guess it was of that time but um but also related to that uh was my sense that there's something quite peculiar happening in the world today uh often we imagine that in the us this sort of rise of white nationalism is is a uniquely american thing and in some ways in its expressions it's peculiarly american but but the rise of of these populist leaders who are telling kind of dominant groups or historically dominant groups in their countries that we are the real citizens and we need to protect ourselves against erosion and we need to have a sort of nostalgic politics that goes back to our better previous days you know the classical age of islam um or or of hindutva in india or britain before migrants in the case of brexit um you know or russia before the end of soviet union sort of putin's imaginings this stuff is way too common and way too widespread to be unique to one country something is going on um if you know most of the countries in the world either have a charismatic leader saying these things in power or somebody who's not in power challenging towards power but hasn't yet quite taken it and i think um this feeling of of kind of group erosion um is being coupled with this crazy instinct to sort ourselves that you know we we feel that we have to decide who is in our group and who is it and partly that's because of technology now that we have social media and we're constantly on our phones and our screens our phones and screens are saying you know do you like this or not like this that you fold this person or do you unfollow this person and we're having this heightened you know are you like me or not like me response to almost everything but partly it's also because you know human history goes through these these cycles where there's a cycle where dominant narratives tend to be about how we can do things together and build some sort of future together and then we build you know the roman empire or we build you know muslim andalusia in in spain or we build you know the ottoman empire or or soviet union or whatever it was and um and in those entities you know they may have existed by force but they had a they had a narrative that allowed very different people to imagine they were part of this thing and then they start to come apart and when they start to come apart a new narrative starts to come out and that new narrative is other people are a threat to you you know people who are not like you are a threat there's no way actually that we can kind of coexist it's a battle of all against all and what's happened is is in a way it's it's almost purely a narrative change we've shifted stories from you know a glorious future of us all in a socialist paradise to russians must resist this ukrainian you know user is usurping of our natural space um or similarly in the united states or india or pakistan or anywhere else something like that's going on and so and so yes i think that i mean for me um it's the combination of this pandemic moment and this global feeling of reasserting a sense of threat to oneself a two one's group that have coincided and that sort of set up the the dynamics for for the book yeah i i think um i mean you can look to the past to see these moments happening in other times and places but it's interesting to hear you see it happening in all of these different nations and disparate you know countries and and it's sort of happening simultaneously it's really interesting you know my friends in india can't speak to their own relatives about modi my friends in pakistan can't speak to their own friends about imran khan you know people in america can't speak to their own cousins about trump like you know in in britain people don't speak their own spouses about brexit this is strange and it's very widespread and it suggests some i think fundamental shift in human narrative which i think is not a good shift and one and one that we you know we would be um foolish to allow go unchallenged and so i think the idea of trying to use stories to to lean against this kind of storytelling the people or threat kind of storytelling becomes very important i have one more question of my own then i'm going to let uh ask you some of the questions from the audience but i was interested in you know the last white man refers to you know at least there's a lot of people that are maybe feeling they're the last white man but um the parents of the two sort of main characters are the ones i mentioned who were kind of clinging to this idea of of um whiteness and and the past and um in order to write fiction do you have to kind of um feel some kind of maybe not love but real compassion for those characters as well as you know the characters who undergo a change and evolve or already evolved yeah i mean for me absolutely yes and i think in a sense that that's the dangerous terrain you know to give um a character the dignity of their own interiority um to allow them to be the hero of their narrative even if that narrative or that animating impulse is something that that as a writer as a person you might find you know profoundly objectionable um to me it's part of the task in other words um uh in this novel for example the novel is a novel about loss about people losing things and it's of course losing of one's racial identity but also in anderson's father's case he's at the end of his life you know losing his life um uh una's mother has lost you know her son una's brother and her husband oona's father and feels that her group is losing she's losing in a sense you know her group uh sort of this idea of whiteness and the novel takes i guess very seriously the idea of this loss um because i think at the moment in human society there is this profound sense of loss things are changing so rapidly and because of technology the pace of change is accelerating that we many of us feel just overwhelmed you know unmoored we're thinking you're losing things so fast like already my children are experiencing a childhood that seems so different from mine yeah and uh you know as that stuff gets lost um it it uh it creates a profound anxiety and i think you know that anxiety if we don't acknowledge it that is the sort of fertile ground where these nostalgic appeals and the idea of group is threatened takes root and so i think for me it's much more important to acknowledge the anxiety you know to give the anxiety and the sense of loss dignity um not to say not not that the thing being lost needs to be dignified but who feels that they're losing needs a sense of dignity around the sense of loss if we're to understand them and if we're to try to you know to move things in the same way that if you have a friend who's you know who's mother or father is a real jerk and that person passes away you know it's one thing to tell your friend that i'm so sorry that you you lost a parent and to been to hold them and to make them you know uh feel compassion without saying that the parent was a nice person um and so i think for these characters what i've tried to do you know which is potentially i suppose a fraught or even dangerous thing to do is to allow them to really be the heroes of their own narrative um to to acknowledge the feeling of loss that they're having and to see if we can't win through to something with that and and you know and and winning through for me in this novel uh really is based on love um that you know uh it's it's anders's father's love for his son despite being completely unsettled by what's happened to his son that makes him want to bequeath something to his son to show his son that you know he can he can die he can face death you know with dignity and you know it's una's um love for her mother that sort of has her stay with her mother despite her mother's you know uh increasingly crazy views um and una's daughter's love for her grandmother who you know uh at the end of the novel in a sense her daughter's horrified by what her grandmother thinks um and and she and she tells her grandmother look you know stop saying this stuff um but she says it um without removing love from her grandmother and offering her grandmother maybe a bridge that she could walk across if she wanted to walk across away from where she had been before and so for me that's very important i think i think that um that the the enterprise does depend on on allowing these human beings to be the heroes of what they imagine their stories to be um and then to see can a path be built from that story to a better place so interesting and um sort of in some ways antithetical to the tone of the conversation in the world which i think is you know great when novels can offer a different tonality and a different way of thinking about it um so i'm just going to look at some of the questions i want to say one thing in response what you just said in terms of the antithetical to the tone um you know living in pakistan uh with afghanistan you know just a few hours drive from my house and seeing the kind of civil war that's that's that has you know happened there um i'm certain that in kabul there were many more progressive open-minded people than there were sort of taliban fighters who came to the city but there was a civil war and those people lost and i think that i think that it's worth asking ourselves um you know to what extent is a descent into that kind of conflict possible in our societies i think it's too easy to imagine look that could never happen we'll never get that far and so and so for me this the tone of unyielding opposition um is a tone that suggests that we will eventually come to a contest of power and it is entirely possible that in the contest of power those who have sort of moral you know the moral uh righteousness or or what i would believe to moral moral correctness could win it's also possible they could lose and and it certainly isn't a kind of contest anybody should want like nobody should want their society to become like afghanistan and so i so i think i'm a little bit concerned you know by the tone um not by being horrified by what's going on i mean i'm horrified by what's going on but i think that um that that tonally uh and i think and i think that tone is also appropriate but i think that that more than one tone needs to be explored um you know is there is there a way as groups are sort of digging in and becoming more intensified in their conflict is there a way to destabilize that developer um right and free up people to shift groups you know to to no longer be a participant in this battle of all against all and so and so yeah i think i think it is it is against i guess a lot of the tone that we see at the moment but i i also think that the danger that we face is profound um and and and not just one tone is going to be enough to see us through yeah and you're you're speaking from sort of seeing it firsthand and how it can go and people i think especially in the united states maybe not believing that um even though we can look to history here and see that we we don't somehow have that we have a little bit of that amnesia um that is you know so strong in this country and um and i do think that fiction one of the things that made me want to be a fiction writer is that radical experience of having to experience the world from someone who is not you yeah from their point of view and that that in itself is what fiction is doing so you know it was interesting like and the worst fiction doesn't do the work you're talking about i think we've all read that and it feels like medicine or didactic you know in a way you know one has to run the risk of being perceived as a traitor by some people of one's own group if one is going to try to destabilize that dynamic that causes another group to be in conflict of one's own right so if you try to broker indo-pak peace and you know i've been involved in artists you know across the border some people hate that idea you know how can you and there's this sort of reek of of i guess treachery um around that and so and so similarly an effect in a fictional con construct if you create these characters who have profoundly objectionable views um and you do so in a sense with a kind of care for for them um there is a question of you know it has some kind of treachery been perpetrated here and and and i think and i think you know it's not one that one can ignore but i think it's it's one that for me is counterproductive i think as artists um and as writers um it's important to um try to destabilize some of these binaries and try to try to you know get people out of the conflict that they think you know uh they must pursue um and in particular in this novel in a sense by focusing on on the more powerful and dominant party which is focusing on these sort of characters who believe themselves to be white and seeing if it's possible to destabilize what they believe yes um there's a writer i really love called noel ignacio have you read how the irish became white no it's amazing i love the title yeah and he talks he's white he writes about being a traitor to his own race and um you know talks about you know whiteness as as a construct and it's just a sort of language we use for social power and anyway you would love him thank you um so one of the questions in the q a um is asking about the influence of kafka in the metamorphosis on this book and probably from the reading the opening yeah so so you know in in kafka's classic metamorphosis um gregor samsa wakes up one day and he's he's a giant bug and um and we got we go from there and obviously the opening of this book uh you know nods to that that move um i mean it's probably worth mentioning of course that you know um kafka wasn't the first person to take a character you know and transform them into something else um you know whether that's greek mythology or hindu mythology or or the arabian night so you know every every tradition of course has some version but definitely kafka's move um and the move of this novel are i suppose in a conversation um i i'm always i've always been very interested in you know early and mid 20th century sort of modernist writers you know the virginia wolves and and kafkas and and and calvinos and jorge luis borges and you know these kind of writers who were playing with form and playing with reality at a time like ours when wars were on the increase and you know people were being placed into you know out groups and exterminated in fact and technology was was changing and i think that we can learn a lot from that period but also from those writers uh what what i think kafka was trying to do in a sense was to say you know here's how gregor samsa in a sense ceases to belong to humanity that uh in the same way that in the i guess industrial age you do a job that doesn't feel like a real job you're just doing some repetitive tasks over and over again but also in the same way that in you know in in the europe of that time certain groups of people you know most notably jews were um suddenly no longer human and i think that you know kafka was exploring both those european specific uh cultural themes and also um a general industrial revolution theme i guess what i'm trying to do in this book is something you know slightly different which is um you know imagine a world where everybody is a bug and they suddenly become human or if we all become if we were all humans we all become bugs together um in a sense um you know if kafka's preoccupation was the way in which um one of us can be cut off from the herd [Music] you know mine is uh how we come up with the idea of the herd and whether and whether in a sense the herd can be imagined away and we're left with just animals you know roaming on the savannah so so i guess you could say they're in a way mirror image projects you know they're they're doing similar things but perhaps in opposite directions yes i love that um this question is i was mesmerized by your writing most long paragraphs for one sentence with partial and repetitive phrases i felt like i was on a boat rocking back and forth while making some progress forward what led to your style for this book from richard ellinson so that's a very interesting question and um you know the sentences of the novel are i guess they do two things you know one is that they often change perspective within a sentence so you're in anders's head and then he's going to see his father and in the same sentence you're sort of in anderson's father's head and then you're kind of in this omniscient authorial point of view looking at the characters from outside this third person and and i think that idea of of uh a set your point of view being fluid within a sentence um is uh is resonating with the idea of of the character's point of views become fluid becoming fluid in the course of the novel and also maybe the reader's point of view becoming a little bit fluid hopefully during the course of reading the novel but also the way the sentences are built is that often an idea will be put forth and then it's kind of well but also this and then maybe a little bit of that happened and you know actually there's more of this and and i think that when we think as human beings we're often thinking like that you know i'll say something i'll say that's not quite right and then i'll say something and i you know you keep meandering towards an understanding of something now these days we are almost prone to using a kind of social media approach of putting out a tweet and then saying this is what i think and i'm going to die by that um and i think that that you know by it becomes in a sense performative language where we say something and then we are wedded to the thing that we have said and we will perform an allegiance to what we've said as opposed to i guess the kind of investigative language we're saying something and we're not quite sure if we think the same thing the next day and then we kind of and i i think it's in a sense much more fertile to have language um meander towards ever greater understanding than to have language sort of a test an unchanging truth i mean there are some unchanging truths but but you know most of the time what we're doing is we're saying something that we're not quite sure about so so i guess that's how the sentences are built and the last thing i'll say about that is you know about 30 years ago i had the enormous kind of cosmic good fortune of of of taking a a writing class with tony morrison and i and i began my first novel in this class and she said something that stayed with me which is that you um your reader um you should keep your reader a half heartbeat ahead of the action of the novel um they shouldn't know what's coming next but when it comes it should feel inevitable and i think um you know for a filmmaker that is done through the score it's done to the camera movement etc but you know for those of us who are novelists in many ways it's the way that you build the sentences that that that begins to set the stage for certain kinds of movement in perspective and in point of view and in just attitude that that then when they happen the work has already been done and so so the book is written in this i guess this way um hopefully trying to set the stage emotionally for what's what's going to happen uh in the book whether it succeeds it's sort of up to the reader but that's that was the intention [Music] well definitely are you do you do social media at all i no i don't so i don't need there so we're out of them but i mean reading the book and reading fiction in general always feels like the opposite of what my experiences of reading twitter yeah like i get very jangled feeling and then like the novel feels like the both the bomb for that but also for like my attention span to not be broken i think that's right i think i think that for me i find you know twitter to be uh and social media to be you know very uncomfortable um i mean maybe somewhat addictive but it's also uncomfortable like it it brings out a kind of combative um but also not aesthetic and kind of yeah pure like i'm this you know this sort of um i guess uh aggressive show-off-y you know tragically frightened like it's it's this weird it's a weird thing it does to me i think it's a lot and i don't like it so i just stay off the thing um a lot of people are on it and hate it but they sort of still persist um whereas whereas for me a novel is is as you say entirely the opposite right like you're not as a reader ever performing because nobody gets to see how you read and so yeah you sort of relax true your experience of it and i think i think to not be performative is is such a liberation for all of us oh my god that's so great i love that that's like really makes me happy to hear you say that um and someone asked do you write your first draft in longhand or do you write it on the computer i write on the computer and um but you know i have a i guess a strange relationship to writing longhand when i was in about third or fourth grade um you know my parents were called into school uh because they you know found that their son couldn't really write and it would show this page of of supposed writing and it was nobody could read what was written there and they thought this is like complete gibberish like what is this guy done and so they sent me off and i was in california at the time and they sent me off to sort of special education class i guess and um and there this teacher you know asked me to just print in all caps and they said oh okay you know your penmanship is very poor and you're your handwriting um your spelling is atrocious you mix up your letters quite a bit but what you're saying is fine you know you you you can write go back to class and tell them not to worry about your spelling you don't write in cursive you can just block print um and if it's messy it's totally okay just go back and do that and i sort of block printed my way through elementary school you know high school college even law school um you know we still in law school we had computers by college and law school but um but still exams were done in these blue books and you'd have to sort of so i basically wrote i guess half or a third as fast as everybody else i was a very very slow writer um and and i had to really focus and write very neatly and slowly um and uh and i think it really shaped in a way how i write um uh i i you know i write very small novels very slowly and and because i don't i suppose i never evolved into a somebody could write very quickly um i i developed into somebody who thought very carefully about what they wrote because they couldn't write much um and and so you know if you ask you know do you write your first drafts in longhand the answer is no but it's also that because i can't really write them in long hand they look the way you know these sort of small books that um you know where i guess i've sort of painstakingly gone into my way of doing it is my way of reacting to that you know um and it's it's a funny thing and sometimes i tell people i tell the story some people tell me that they're in the audience that their kid you know really struggles um with writing and and i always say look you know it may just turn out that this thing that you think of as a struggle is kind of like your superpower you know the fact that you write much slower than everybody else um means that you're gonna have to figure out a different way to write and if you do figure out a different way to write well it turns out that that can be you know quite useful to write differently so yeah that's how that's i guess that's my story with longhand in writing do you think you do um less drafts because of that like does the first draft feel more like you've written already all the drafts in there it's changed so i've gone from being you know first two novels were like one draft a year for seven years and you know you know toss out each failed draft one after the other and then in the last i guess decade and a half it's been more like you know a few partial attempts you know little sketches that didn't work but then quickly you know quickly within a couple of years getting to a point where i sort of knew how it was going to work and then a draft that looked a lot like the finished book and and i suppose you know a lot of writing is teaching yourself how to write your books and so the first couple of books the first 15 years of novel writing for me were having no idea how to write a novel really and then having to write novel after novel draft after draft figure it out um but more recently i guess i know a little bit more and so and so i i have to do things to figure out you know if this tone if this movement of this way is going to you know if if there's going to be music in it or not but within you know playing just a chapter or two of the music it becomes clear that it is there isn't there and i can and i can you know imagine the rest of the of the composition so so it's changed for me you know i think it really has gone from i was very much a drafting novelist for about 15 years and now i'm kind of a you know messing around a bit and then and then one good draft which gets polished kind of a novelist so i've changed it sounds like it's a good progression just for you personally like it feels like a healthy healthy way to move i'm hoping i can get to that that's no it's it's it's um uh it is uh it's a lot better not writing the whole thing and throwing it away again and again and again um and but but that said i guess you know i had to write maybe 14 novels to get my first two because the first five or six attempts at the first one the first five or six attempts the second one were you know terrible um well it's like an apprenticeship almost yeah you're learning through all those drafts and the failure you know it's like fail better kind of thing right absolutely absolutely and i think you know what i tell what i also tell writers about this particular thing you know young writers we're starting is is i've come to view that it is much less like climbing a mountain and saying you know there's there's you know mount everest and i'm going to get to the top of it i know where i'm going and it's much more like digging a well in other words writing is you make a void in your day of a few hours and in that void you don't do anything else it's just a hole where you sit there and you try to write and maybe you won't succeed in writing anything very useful but you do try to write you know pretty much every day and if you do that the funny thing is over a few years you know stuff comes in the same way if you make a hole in the ground and it fills with water that's what a well is so now i'm i'm much more wedded to the idea of um you know i guess you know if you if you think of it it's less a question of you know do you get to heaven and more questions did you pray today so practice yeah so so it's um you know it's uh i guess in my early novels i thought i have to write a book that does this and then i would sort of yeah often write that thing and i'd be totally lost i write this thing and i would i guess done what i thought i was going to do and discover it doesn't go anywhere and now i'm i suppose a little bit more patient in the sense of um i'm not always sure exactly what the writing is until i really figure it out but i understand that that's okay they don't have to be have something that looks like the draft of a novel i'm if i'm sitting there trying it'll it'll it'll you know it'll become water eventually so so i i kind of wait for it i suppose much more now than i used to and do you see the all of your novels as being sort of in conversation i mean they're obviously all written with your preoccupations and obsessions and um but i'm interested in the relationship between the different books yeah i mean my first novel it's my first three novels um uh we we've talked about the idea that you know readers co-create novels and that and that really a novel is a kind of invitation to play make-believe together between writer and reader and my first three novels all in a sense directly addressed the reader they were about you know the reader in mod smoke is this sort of judge that all the other characters tell their story and it's a small rule but it's it's not just a reader and in fundamentalist ching is meets this american who's addressed as you um and that you of course also is a bit of a stand-in for the audience and so it's hard to slip into a fully passive position um when this guy keeps saying you to you over and over again in the book it's more like a dramatic monologue on a one-man you know one-woman stage play and then how to get filtration rising asia it was very much um an idea of you the reader and eventually an i who was the author and the characters called you and the whole thing um but in my most recent so those three novels i guess were for me about exploring this notion of what is the reader writer relationship and what is the fertility of that and what can that do [Music] and then um the more recent two haven't in a sense directly addressed the reader as you they've just tried to build stories that do the same thing um maybe you know in a simpler um or less off-putting way that i started to wonder if if my approach was you know too dependent on readers having the same kind of education or or cultural outlook or attitude towards literary fiction that i have that i'm building these novels for readers who are like me um and and you know is that is that actually kind of weird the elitist thing to be doing and so i thought you know let me in in exit west sort of build the decoder ring of the novel into the book and so i'll remove a lot of specificity and remove names and remove sort of place names and do all sorts of things make it small and leave gaps and allow the reader to fill those things in without drawing attention to the reader writer relationship and and the same thing the last white man in a way um it's i suppose a follow-on to uh exit west in the sense that it uses a lack of specificity and and gaps and space to allow the reader to play this role instead of sort of directly addressing right so i i mean i i i think that there's been a kind of similar project throughout the books but you know as i've grown up as a writer i feel like there are um there are ways to create that fertile space for readers that that um don't involve advertising themselves quite so much and just sort of can organically happen um i think we're almost out of time but one person is asking what you your next project is if you can talk about it i'm not really sure i mean one thing that i've been grappling with i've been trying to write it the last two novels uh is about technology and how we relate to technology what it's doing to us um i tried to write that for exit west and then i found that the part of technology that interested me was the way the technology collapses distance and so i wound up writing a novel where distance collapses and the whole world migrates in the space of a couple of years and that was exit west but it wasn't a novel about our relationship with technology exactly and then i wanted to do that novel this time and i started to focus on the way in which technology has this kind of sorting mechanism and how we're increasingly sorting ourselves into categories like me or not like me and i wrote a novel where that sorting mechanism breaks down where you can't really sort people at least in a racial sense and to like me or not like you've got to figure out something else some other way of thinking about these people so hopefully next time i actually will figure out a way to write this novel about technology that is actually about technology or i will discover that the way i write novels about technology is to write novels about other stuff right yeah and and i'll just i'll give up on the direct approach and i'll realize i'm kind of a i approach i guess you know tangentially to this to this thing right that's the intention the subconscious will lead you somewhere else right yeah i mean one of the things that as you know you know about writing is that um you know you discover so much um about yourself and about you know what you're writing about in the process of writing so i don't write novels in a way to tell people what i already know um i you know i i write novels to think about stuff that confuses me and also to invite readers into an experience which you know maybe confuses them but hopefully lets them then think about what what's happened so um so yeah that that's pretty much that's pretty much it that's wonderful thank you so much for watching conversation that you've given us thank you beautiful beautiful so so incredible thought so thought provoking um i especially love the idea of the reader being a co-creator of the novel and um and thinking about stuff that you are confused about that's fantastic that is just fantastic so thank you very much congratulations on the book thank you to miami book fair to all of our bookstore partners for joining us beautiful cover by the way this is the not the finished book but here it is absolutely gorgeous and um thank you so much for joining us thank you thanks very much good night great night