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May 09, 2007

THREE MINUTE INTERVIEW (3MI) - ARTHUR PHILLIPS

Ap We can't think of a better way for you to spend Friday night than popping over to Vroman's in Pasadena to catch Arthur Phillips reading and signing his new novel Angelica, a Victorian ghost story and "an intriguing literary and psychological puzzle, and a meditation on marriage, childhood, memory, and fear."  In honor of his Los Angeles visit, we convinced him to sit for a 3MI - in which the first three questions are custom-written, and the last two are the same for all players.

Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis in 1969 and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion. His first novel, Prague, a national bestseller, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and received The Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for best first novel. His second novel, The Egyptologist, was a national and international bestseller, and was on more than a dozen “Best of 2004” lists. Angelica is his third novel. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

We'll also be offering a copy of Angelica for this Friday's TEV Giveaway, so make sure you come back for your chance to win.

TEV:  Over three novels, you've ranged in time and place from post-curtain Budapest to early 20th century Egypt to Victorian England but you seem to have become something of a go-to for Eastern European issues (witness your recent Marai review for the New Yorker). Readers of this site know I have a special interest in All Things Hungarian but we also know novelists don't like to be thought of simply in terms of their first novel. How do you reconcile this continuing notoriety with your clearly wide-ranging literary ambitions?

AP: Well, the Magyar Go-To thing is a lucky break for me. I'm not really an expert, I just have read a lot of Hungo-lit, so when it comes time to write a review, I feel comfortable putting myself out there. And really it's just self-serving: I really like Marai, so I jumped when I saw The Rebels was coming. And I'll claim the right to pontificate about other varieties of Central European, too. I just wrote about Milan Kundera in Harpers, and that was also taking advantage of a recent publication (The Curtain) and of my vague reputation as having something to do with the Czechs, but mostly it was to publish some Kundera-thoughts I'd been mulling over for, literally, a decade.

And, the beautiful thing is that I stumbled into Hungary. I don't have any Hungarian blood, had never been there before I moved there, still barely speak a few words of it. But I found myself a country that I love (and now I do have Hungarian relatives) and I love the writers, so I am more than happy to (illegitimately) claim some Hungarian expertise simply from having written a novel about people with exactly zero Hungarian expertise. And because I wrote it, I get to go back to Hungary dressed as a literary figure, I get to correspond with my Hungarian translator, I get to feel like I'm somehow wise in matters of Marai or Nadas or Krudy. I live with no fear that this limited skill will overwhelm my other ambitions.

TEV: A recurring theme in the Standard Arthur Phillips Profile is that you reject the "Write what you know" model, though as a five-time Jeopardy! winner one could argue that perhaps there's little that you don't know. I'm always drawn to writers and artists who don't keep repeating themselves but who show some creative restlessness, leaping around trying new things. Can you talk about what animates your choices?

Ang AP: The thing about stuff like this is, you do what you want and then, after it's done, you start a personal religion to justify what you did. As a friend of mine said, "Philosophy is just inclination wearing a toga." I write about the notions that grab me hard enough to convince me I could spend two or three years doing nothing else. And when those moments of inspiration come, it's not usually about any grand idea, exactly; it has, all four times now, been a fragment of plot or a scrap of a character or a glimpse of some unique structural possiblity, and I recognize that kernel as something I haven't read somewhere before. It's usually an inspiration about writing or about a story, not about the nature of life, so, by definition, it's not about me or what I know; it's about books and what I want to read, and therefore what seems like fun to write about. What I write is what I'd want to read. Can I say "fun" or does that make me sound shallow? You know the old story about Trollope shooting his reputation as a serious writer in the foot by admitting that he sometimes started writing his next book within MINUTES of finishing his last one?

TEV: You're a smart, literary writer who not only doesn't disdain plot but embraces the notion of story. Wherefore this acute narrative sensibility?

AP: Again, subsequently canonized inclinations. I write what I like to read, and as I look at my bookshelves, all my favorite novels contain stories. But, then again, this is one of those questions that might hinge on a confused definition. I'm not sure I can think of a novel that doesn't have a story... That said, maybe I'm not an adventurous enough reader. Ulysses has a story, and I read that. Am I starting to sound stupid yet?  (TEV Note: Hell, no!  We're all in favor of plot at this URL.)

TEV:  Who is the best author we've never heard of?

AP: Possibly Rohan Kriwaczek, but the jury is still out. He's only written one book, and he is purportedly working on a second, but I will read it as soon as it's done, and then let you know if he wins the title. Have you heard of Gyula Krudy? Everyone in Hungary has... I always say Georges Perec, but more and more people know him. Up and comers like Kelly Link? Appalachian wizards like Ron Rash? Nobody reads Witold Gombrowicz anymore, I suppose, but you've heard of him, I bet. You know that beautiful four-volume set written by Anthony Powell, The Dance to the Music of Time? Unbelievably good.

TEV:  Ask yourself any question you like - but be sure to answer it!

AP:  Hmmm...

Q: How many published novelists live within one mile of your apartment?
AP: Thirty? More?
Q: Which of them is the most preposterously pompous?
AP: I refuse to answer that question, and you should be ashamed of yourself for asking.

Don't forget to catch Arthur Phillips at Vroman's on Friday night - details here.  We haven't quite finished the new one yet but we're enjoying it as much as the first two, which is to say a great deal.  Smart, funny, involving fiction.  Egesegedre!

Posted at 12:01 AM in Interviews |

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Comments

Dan Wickett

Very cool interview, Mark!

Having seen Phillips read in Ann Arbor earlier this month, I'll second Mark's suggestion that those near Vroman's head on out.

Also, very cool to see him nod in Ron Rash's direction - a fantastic writer - probably one of the few with nine in print that not that many have heard of or read.

Posted by: Dan Wickett | May 09, 2007 at 04:36 AM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
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    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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