I have always done my best to learn from failure. And I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t report that, this afternoon, while conducting an author interview, I failed to carry out my duties as interviewer. I hope that my honesty here will atone for my inadequacies.
This afternoon, I attempted to have a conversation with Marisha Pessl for The Bat Segundo Show. I use the word “attempted,” because I saw no point to continue the conversation after the twenty minute mark. It wasn’t working out and we would have gone around in circles. I thanked Ms. Pessl for her time, apologized, and she ran away from me as if I were a leper.
We weren’t getting anywhere. I think it’s because Ms. Pessl, and please understand that I am not trying to make her look malevolent here, isn’t accustomed to having her assumptions questioned. Maybe it’s because, last year, I made about one tenth the amount that Pessl got for her book, and there was a division. Maybe it’s because Pessl is attractive and I’m just some average-looking thirtysomething going bald. Maybe it’s because my interviewing style is less rapid-fire Q&A and more conversational and idiosyncratic. Maybe it’s because I don’t like to ask questions that everybody else asks. Maybe it’s because Pessl doesn’t like to consort with my kind.
I honestly don’t know. But I deeply regret what happened.
My approach, which has been carried forth in over 130 author interviews, is to offer ideas and observations and to work in a series of conversational calls and responses with the author. These are things I have picked up from careful study of the interview masters: Robert Birnbaum, Dick Cavett, and a number of other interviewing influences. But in Pessl’s case, she kept asking me, “What’s the question?” When I offered a few unusual perceptions of her book, it was apparently incompatible with her absolute authorial intentions. And even then, you couldn’t talk about this, because figuring out Pessl’s book was up to the reader. So what then was the point of the interview? (Interestingly, while Mark Danielewski kept his cards close to his chest and doesn’t like to reveal answers, we were still able to talk about Only Revolutions quite well. Did I simply fail to read Special Topics in Calamity Physics? I don’t know.)
So I abandoned my usual approach and opted for a more routine approach of boilerplate questions.
“Okay,” I asked, “but what of literary ambiguity?” That stuff that William Empson was writing about more than seventy years ago. “What steps did you take to allow for invention? What kind of herringbone plot structure did you jump off from?”
I got terse responses from Pessl that had nothing to do with these questions.
Pessl had looked at her watch about ten minutes in and seemed about as happy to chat with me as if I were some porter she’d have to endure as she checked in her luggage. I failed to connect. It was my fault.
Why did I want to interview Pessl? Well, I’ve always done my best to talk with the misunderstood. And I had a sense that, irrespective of the class chasm, Pessl was misunderstood.
There had been considerable controversy over whether the book had been accepted because of Pessl’s good looks and because the book had been judged less on its merits and more on the amount of money. I had wanted to talk about some of the book’s constructs: the reliance upon annotations, the hermetic bubble that the protagonist Blue prevents her from interacting with the world, the like. I would stop, allowing for a pause, and then Pessl would stare at me.
I failed.
Then again, I suppose, after 130 interviews, a failed interview had to happen sooner or later.
I’m still determining what I plan to do with the conversation we recorded.
So for the moment, I apologize to Ms. Pessl, to Penguin for going to the trouble of arranging this, and to my listeners and readers.
The hell of it is, I conducted two really great interviews earlier in the week.
I’ve held my own with Martin Amis, John Updike, Richard Ford, and Erica Jong. Why then could I not talk with Pessl?
I look upon this failure as a learning experience. This incident has certainly made me rethink how I approach interviews. And aside from one interview I have lined up, I plan on taking a break from these conversations. I’m going to dwell upon what happened and get back to you with an answer on what I plan to do with this material.
In the meantime, there are many interviews in the can, all of them quite fun and good, and my conversation with Marshall Klimasewiski should go up tomorrow.
[UPDATE: Thanks to all for the kind words. I'm truly stunned. I've listened to the interview and I think it would be best for all concerned parties if I didn't post it. If I came into the interview to have a literary discussion and it didn't happen, then I'd rather take the high road here.]
Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz: Being wrong, as it turns out, isn't just the other variable in a binary opposition. Indeed, the relationship between our beliefs and the vast body of knowledge is one of humanity's big problems, but, at times, one of its great virtues. This thoughtful volume outlines numerous examples of human folly, from end-of-the-world prophets to ocular misperception, and makes a strong case for becoming more transparent about human fallibility, even when the results can be quite deadly. (
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after I googled “herringbone plot structure”, I read the rest of the comments. What a tempest in a teapot! You were arrogant and shallow, she flubbed the required responses, and if you are both lucky, the world will rapidly forget that this ended up just being another episode in the tediously long history of men attacking good-looking women with intellectual bullshit.
Thank all beneficent gods that in my 50s, now, only about half the men I end up in conversation with react first to my appearance and now and then one or two actually listen to what I say. She’s young, she’ll deal with it – what about you? Haven’t you got better things to do? No one reading this ought to be in the least deluded that feminism has actually gotten US much further in the past 40 years.
“Writers don’t send out head shots with our manuscripts… that isn’t how publishing works. Good looks might help the marketability of an already-sold novel, but as I’m sure her editor can testify, selling the ms ain’t a beauty contest.”
Yes, I’m sure Ms. Pessl’s ms languished in a Laker-tall slushpile until a red-eyed intern plucked it by chance from ignominy and was stunned…stunned…after hours of breathless page-turning to realise that he/she had struck that rarest of nuggets: pure literary gold! (cue: montage of faux naive cinematic rags-to-riches type “success” imagery, c. 1935)
“Anyone can say what they want about Calamity Physics, and their problems with Ms Pessl and their views on her hair or her lack of failure, or whatever, but the novel was a best-seller, and one of the Times top ten books of the year.”
Success, I find, is *without fail* the most accurate index of artistic seriousness. If only a few people buy it, it is a poor effort, lacking in merit. If many buy it, it is a brilliant example of what the finest and healthiest literary minds are capable of!
Yo, Bellow, make room in The Canon, we’ve got a hot one here…and I mean that in both senses of the word! Va-va-va voooom!
“Key impediments to communicating can actually, be identified — even beforehand. Deeper places can be found even on book tours. In general with all the verbiage being put forth, it might lead to some more depthful, and more helpful, conversations; and these days it seems like we need them.”
And I’m supposed to believe that an *editor* of some sort generated this depthful verbiage.
Final entry in this comment triptych:
(quoting from the sophomoric work in question:)
“There was Mona Letrovski, the actress from Chicago with wide-set eyes and dark hair on her arms who liked to shout, “Gareth, you’re a fool,” with her back to him, Dad’s cue to run over to her, turn her around and see the Look of Bitter Longing on her face. Only Dad never turned her around to see the Bitter Longing. Instead, he stared at her back as if it was an abstract painting.”
or
“Some of the sweeter, more docile ones like poor, droopy-eyed Tally Meyerson, I actually felt sorry for, because even though Dad made no attempt to hide the fact they were as temporary as Scotch tape, most were blind to his indifference (see “Basset Hound,” Dictionary of Dogs, Vol. 1).”
Reading such thuddingly unwitty juvenilia, methinks the morally outraged posters in this comment thread doth glow with a richly comedic light. The only question that remains is why Mr. Champion, who recently interviewed Martin Amis ferchrissakes, felt compelled to interview this bulge-in-the-bell-curve-type “writer” in the first place.
The End Times are nigh, chillen…
Well, that’s your great system. Devastating posts– yet this is what the lot of you continue to defend, criticizing it around the margins, but not daring to take real whacks at the tottering edifice itself.
Still, Marisha has her defenders– as did poor Marie Antoinette.
The privileged class always finds its defenders.
We’re at the beginning stages of cultural revolution. Not moderate reform, but real change. Necessary change. Advocacy of change is the strongest argument and will win every debate– because it’s the only way this decrepit art form which we all in our different ways are involved in can be saved.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t even finish Special Topics…I didn’t like it. My problem (and, I suspect others’ problem) with Ed’s post was what I saw as his lack of sincerity, not his personal take on Pessl. The author’s identity in this case was irrelevant, at least for me.
I think you should post the interview as well. I don’t see a point in posting about the interview–you must know that a post like this will stoke the desire of your readers to listen to the interview–and then not posting the interview itself. Commenters here are attacking you or sympathizing with you based only on your post. You should let them draw conclusions based on the interview.
The green, orange and navy blue motif is… weird. I advocate monochromatics.
Please talk again about how you were crying when you were arrested. Funny shit. You’re a real tough guy, which we all love. Minus the horse shoe haircut. Look you fucked up and you mean nothing wrong by her. No big deal… just keep the sad trip going smart guy.
Or will you not recognize that the vast majority of people who read your post think think this is just lame. Come on buddy. Get some balls. Or least talk about the crying again.
What’s all this “sincerity” (and the lack thereof) business, anyway? Has Rabbi Ed Champion failed his wide-eyed congregation again? Is the Segundo show about “sincerity” or is it an amusing variation on the grill-a-scribe format, provided for our entertainment as well as our intellectual edification? It’s a performance, folks. If you want a more seamless simulation of “sincerity” stick with your Oprah. Stick with your Bill O’Reilly. Your Bill and Hillary Clintons.
For all those crying that it would have been *okay* if Champion had gone ahead and sincerely tore Ms. Pessl a new one: what planet do you wise citizens live on? One can only imagine the ensuing double-shitstorm if he’d done so…not to mention the blowback on Segundo as an institution. Champion had a point to make that he wasn’t permitted (by common sense) to make directly. We were offered the opportunity to read between the lines with wry smirks and move on. Being too literal-minded to accept this offer, of course, the finger-wagging pooh-pooh brigade (and so soon after the anti-Sarvas n+1-eMail Sanctimonathon, too!) went to work.
What I for one enjoy about the frontier decorum of online bookchat is the personality on display, richly saturating the product. When I read lofty print reviews of Ms. Pessl’s book claiming it a masterpiece and a triumph (with the minor mitigation that it takes 300 pages…300 pages!… to “take off”), I knew the fix was in. Pessl was going to be the Next Big Thingy, regardless (irrespective?) of the actual merits of her book. I would have appreciated a gut reaction or two.
It was refreshing to read Champion’s very human take on things; reassuring that *everyone* wasn’t in on the ruse. If Pessl is being promoted as an ueber-erudite writer (based on the fact that she, what, peppered the text with references both real and imagined?), and Champion reveals the middling intellect (with a modicum of verbal facility, and TV-bred plot savvy) behind the PR facade…I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful because I suspect that the bullshit facade rankled him, too, and he set out to do a little debunking. It was Quixotic on his part, of course. Pessl has been outflanking debunking attempts by guys like Ed since junior high school prep. One eye-roll and a flip of the hair and Ed’s toast.
Would Special Topics… have been purchased and published and hyped if Pessl had been a fat, balding fifty-ish dude named Wilbur with a day job requiring a paper hat? As if.
I’d like to think that Champion was thinking of Wilbur when he hit Pessl with that herringbone riff.
How can I set up an interview with Marisha? I’m sure we can weave our way through that herringbone plot pattern together and find that key to open up that secret garden that I’m sure she’s hidden somewhere! We’ll explore unknown depths together and she’ll never be accused of superficiality ever again.