Condition of Mr. Segundo: Trying to locate his voice.

Author: Claire Messud

Subjects Discussed: Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, references to revolution in The Emperor’s Children, Russian literature, Chauncey Gardner in Being There, Dostoevsky, the influences that spawned Bootie, on Messud writing novels outside her generational milieu, responding to Meghan O’Rourke’s review, why Messud didn’t present contrasting ideologies in The Emperor’s Children, hermetic atmosphere, Deborah Solomon and New York media types, Tingle Alley and Infinite Jest, Fort Greene and getting New York neighborhoods right, the influence of decor on character action, preposterous book titles, the cat in Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters vs. the cat in The Emperor’s Children, Anglicized dialogue, fantastic vs. realist environment, cognitive development, The Great Escape, and Anthony Powell.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Messud: I always think of Annabelle as somebody who’s actually out there accomplishing things when nobody’s paying attention. But “revolutionary” is probably too strong a word for [Bootie]. He’s someone who’s going to unsettle things and try to change things. And he comes from a different place: mentally as well as physically. I think that, for me, there’s a tension in the novel, I suppose, between Murray Thwaite, Bootie’s uncle, who is an old-fashioned liberal, and Ludovic Seeley, who is the person to whom the word “revolution” is most often attached. And he is a sort of — a slippery fish. He’s somebody — truth is a changeable thing. Meaning is a changeable thing. What’s good is a changeable thing. And Bootie is somewhere in between these two. And he’s somebody who would like to emulate his uncle and admire his uncle, and finds that when he sees him up close, that he can’t fully do that.

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Author: Kate Atkinson

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Investigating turns of an altogether different sort.

Subjects Discussed: Narrative flow, the difficulty of writing the first 100 pages, perspective, good sentences, discovering the internal monologue, writing about inept men, narrative sadism, similarities between T.C. Boyle and Kate Atkinson, technological references in One Good Turn, “guys” to call on for research, Google vs. libraries, dialogue, the influence of reading while working on a novel, “romps,” British prejudices against genre, the word “jolly,” Case Histories vs. One Good Turn, empathy through the omniscient voice, being pigeonholed because of the Jackson Brodie books, Kate Atkinson’s other voices, the exuberant voice, maintaining a sense of fun, a sense of order, theme vs. plot, morality within One Good Turn, and the Honda Man.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Atkinson: You’re working all day on words. Do you really want to then do words the rest of the time? What I would like to do when I’m not, when I’m really engaged with a book, is to just look at a tree really. But it tends to take the form of looking at television. I just want to look at something that’s not words. Because that’s what you’re doing all day. I mean, I’m really glad I read most of world literature before the age of twenty-one. I would never have time for it now or have the inclination for it, I think. I did my reading when I had the space. And now I don’t have that kind of space.

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Author: Francine Prose

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Introspective about Xmas realities.

Subjects Discussed: Reading like a writer vs. reading as an escapist, Car Talk, reading People as preparation for reading Chekhov, The Illustrated Elements of Style, diagramming sentences, making grammar fun, academia and the poststructuralist vogue, how theory influences writing, concise writing vs. prodigious writing, Infinite Jest, one-line paragraphs and David Markson, Raymond Carver, Ben Marcus and “experimental” writing, Only Revolutions, literary absolutes, Jackson Pollock, the “show don’t tell” rule, Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe, the Nabokov estate, working on a book too long, the “death” of book culture, puzzle novels, Pynchon, the 2006 National Book Award nominees, not finishing books, William Gaddis, James M. Cain’s Past All Dishonor, James Wood, naturalist dialogue reflecting a historical time, transcribing speech, chapters and blocks of text, pointless detail, and Nicholson Baker.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Prose: People keep telling me that all those vogues for structuralism and poststructuralism and deconstructionism are passing, which couldn’t make me happier. And you know I think that those things have had a very bad effect not only on reading, but on writing. I mean, that is because they encourage people to use jargon. They encourage students to use jargon. I mean, when I teach, one of the assignments that I give is to ask my students to find a passage of jargon — academic jargon, literary jargon, art history jargon — and then translate it back into English, and bring both passages into class. And often the jargon they come up with is theory jargon. Literary theory jargon. So nothing can make me happer than to hear that that’s on its way out.

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Authors: Joe Meno, Todd Taylor, Todd Dills and Bucky Sinister

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Responding to MySpace lies.

Subjects Discussed: Shirley Wins, pumpkin launching, Halloween, grandmothers, writing women convincingly, Sons of the Rapture, Strom Thurmond, the differences between North Carolina and South Carolina, moving to Chicago vs. moving to New York, Whiskey and Robots, populist poetry, the Icarus myth vs. Wayne Gretzky, independent book touring, BookScan, growing up books, novels that use fiction as an escape mechanism, Encyclopedia Brown, cryptograms, textual buildings, creating a sense of mystery, telemarketing, Mark Haddon, Alessandro Baricco’s Silk, Faulkner, Donald Barthelme, short chapters, savvy audiences and storytelling, inventiveness, how the success of Hairstyles affected Meno, sartorial colors, Dick Tracy, the Boy Detective play, and indie presses vs. corporate presses.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Meno: For me, the book is about how as an adult you negotiate a world of mystery, a world where you don’t have the answers. And so I wanted the audience, or the reader as they were reading, to feel that sense of surprise. That when you’re a kid and you get a detective kit, you look at the world a little bit differently because of that object. And so I wanted the actual text to be surprising. As you were reading through it, you weren’t exactly sure technically what was going to happen. If you’d have a couple pages that were blank. Or if you’d have some of the text that was broken up into these small little buildings that go throughout the book or if there’d be a piece of text that was shaped like a cloud. And so that, you know, using the text itself to give that sense of mystery or surprise to the audience as they were going through.

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Author: Kelly Link

Condition of Mr. Segundo: At odds with his boyhood dreams.

Subjects Discussed: Coffee, the Turkish language, planting little clues within stories, real-life inspirations for fantasy, writing short stories vs. novels, the value of a gestation period, on being easily distracted, being thrown off guard, Link’s pattern-making impulse, Douglas Adams, board games, Cadbury Creme Eggs, breakfast cereals, childhood sense memory, depicting characters without backstory, zombies, having psychologists as parents, William Gibson, bookstores, Edward Gorey, self-publishing, Ben Fountain’s Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, review coverage, “literary” credibility, Scott Smith’s The Ruins, the “literary fiction” label vs. the “science fiction” label, Laura Miller and H.P. Lovecraft, taxonomies, Shelley Jackson’s illustrations, fonts and EC Comics, reacting to older work, “massaging” work, Clarion, George Saunders and New Yorker “fantasy” vs. genre fantasy, and “fictiony literature.”

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Link: I think that being easily distracted mirrors, or is the same thing in some ways, as noticing connections too easily. And that does mean that once you have, once you’re solidly at work on a story, everything you see around you, you can sort of pull in and use. Everything in the story you can sort of tie down to other parts of the story.

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