"Humans relate to each other and understand themselves in the process."

A Q&A with Adam Haslett on his new novel Mothers and Sons.

A new book from Adam Haslett is cause for celebration, something I did in my Chicago Tribune review of his just-released novel Mothers and Sons.

In this past weekend’s newsletter, I spent some time thinking about how it’s pretty much the duty of a writer to give the reader access to the experiences of a character’s consciousness. At least that’s what seems to get me invested in a novel. Adam Haslett is as deft at this as anyone working today. 

I was grateful he had the time to indulge some of my rather involved inquiries about not just Mothers and Sons, but his earlier works as well.

Adam Haslett is the author of Imagine Me Gone, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award; You Are Not a Stranger Here, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Union Atlantic, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. His books have been translated into thirty  languages, and his journalism on culture and politics have appeared in The Financial Times, Esquire, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Nation, and The Atlantic, among others.

He has been awarded the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin, a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Winship Award, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He currently directs the MFA Program at Hunter College.

John Warner: It seems like you have some kind of prescience about what’s going to be in the zeitgeist when your novels are published. I read that you completed Union Atlantic, a novel involving an impending bank collapse and the hubris that’s causing it, was finished concurrently with the 2008 implosion of mortgage-backed securities and collapse of Lehman Brothers. With Mothers and Sons you have a story of an immigration lawyer handling asylum cases towards the tail-end of the Obama administration coming out mere days before Donald Trump retakes office, likely unleashing chaos on our immigration system. Is this just coincidence, or do you find that the undercurrents of culture which inform what you’re interested in writing about have a kind of eternal, or recurring relevance?

Adam Haslett: There’s a commonplace phrase: write what you know, in response to which, I often respond: write what interests you. When it came to Union Atlantic, the Federal Reserve, and its vast, largely uncomprehended power to affect nearly everyone’s economic life interested me a lot and I wanted to set a character at the center of it, and from there a series of other characters suggested themselves. Mothers and Sons didn’t begin as a book about immigration but once I realized Peter would be a lawyer his being an asylum attorney came naturally because of the number of friends I have who have done that job. And then, yes, there is the reality that immigration is perhaps the defining issue not only of our domestic politics, but of global politics in an age of war, climate catastrophe and the displacement that follows. So it was something I wanted to grapple with for my own sake as well, as a citizen and as a writer. 

JW: Where do your novels start? Situation? Character? Some mix of the two, or something else?

AH: They almost always begin with a character on his or her own in a room, either looking out a window or at some set of objects, and in the writing of those first descriptions I’ve searching for the rhythm of the sentences that capture a certain habit of mind, the music of their inner life, as it were. From there it becomes a series of questions: Who is this person? What are they thinking about? What do they find themselves in the midst of? Of course I have some guesses going in, but it’s a fairly open-ended process. And often those first lines are taken from something I’ve written earlier and discarded, so in that sense the composition doesn’t start at some zero hour. It overlaps with earlier abandoned or set aside work. 

JW: I was thinking about the overarching structure of Mothers and Sons in light of your previous novels, Union Atlantic and Imagine Me Gone. In all three books you make use of multiple points of view, including five different first-person perspectives in Imagine Me Gone. (Though Michael’s is quasi-epistolary.) In Mothers and Sons you pare back to two, Peter (the son) and Ann (the mother). Peter’s story is told in first person, while Ann’s is in close third-person. Do you have a process for thinking through these choices or is it instinctual, the situation and character suggesting the best mode for conveying their part of the story?

AH: It goes back to what I said above about finding the right music in the prose to capture their experience of the world. For me, sentences and paragraphs should always be telling you something beyond their explicit content. They should be suggesting the workings of a mind. In Mothers and Sons, Peter is in a sense trapped in an eternal present. He focuses on the hard stories of his clients to the exclusion of nearly all else, while avoiding his own memory. So first person, present tense, however difficult it is to maneuver in for the writer, was really the only option for him. Ann, in contrast, is far calmer, her mind more settled, and her sense of her own life is much more consciously narrated. So the third person, past tense point of view is the one that for me best reproduced in the prose itself, the way she experienced herself and others. Ideally, these things go unnoticed by most readers. Often I can’t remember the tense or point of view a book I’ve read was written in. But it will have affected me nonetheless. 

JW: I am wary of invoking the notion of “trauma” as a narrative device or storytelling fuel because it’s turned into a whole thing that I find counterproductive to engaging with the characters in their multi-dimensional glory, but I do like to think about a character’s “baggage,” the stuff they’re bringing to the story at the time the reader first encounters them. Everyone has a past, and dealing with what’s past is part of the present. Imagine Me Gone is framed by a kind of familial “baggage” of Margaret choosing to marry John even after she knows that he is clinically depressed, and how this in turn impacts their children. Each child has a different set of baggage, and seeing how they deal with it delivers a real depth of pleasure. In Mothers and Sons, Peter and Ann have some very unfinished business when it comes to events from Peter’s childhood, business they’ve been avoiding for a long time, but you can’t outrun it forever. I realize there isn’t a question in there, but I’m wondering how you think about the pasts and burdens your characters carry.

AH: Having written a fair amount about characters defined as “mentally ill,” I’ve given this a fair amount of thought. The truth is, every generation, and every culture for that matter, has different but overlapping words and concepts to make meaning out of our felt sense that past experience shapes present feeling. “Trauma” is the word and concept most present in the U.S. at the moment. Any one of these words or concepts, whether psychiatric or religious, is susceptible to overuse and thus simplification. Frankly, I’m just interested in how people are trained to describe themselves to themselves and how they sometimes manage to become aware of that process and alter the course of it. I suppose awareness, or psychic maturation are two other ways of describing it. And this is always, necessarily, a social reality. It happens in and through relationships to others. And that’s where fiction comes in. To me, it's a bringing to life of the experience of these relational realities. Call that what you will. In structural terms, this is something that doesn’t change from generation to generation, or culture to culture. Humans relate to each other and understand themselves in the process.  

JW: I feel like both Imagine Me Gone and Mothers and Sons grapple with the intersection of love and desire. Sex is always part of it, but there is also the sense of the need to be affirmed by the desire of others, and at the same time, the limits of desire as a sustaining force for connection. Peter knows that he is, to some degree, alienated from his own desire, but also is powerless to close the gaps he perceives in himself. How do you view these parts of ourselves, and how do you explore them in terms of your characters?

AH: That’s a complex question! As a gay man who came of age at the height of the AIDS epidemic, I’m intimately familiar with tensions between sex, fear, desire, and intimacy. And I wanted to capture some of that in Mothers and Sons. I’ve written about gay teens a certain amount, but less about gay adults, for a variety of reasons, I’m sure. But with the character of Peter I wanted to capture some of what I myself went through, less in this particular plot, than in a more generalized guilt that exists for having survived that era at all when so many didn’t. I suppose that’s one of the things fiction can do: distill into dramatic form a less concise emotion. I don’t have answers to any of this. Just the urge to put readers in the shoes of my characters and let them dwell there awhile. 

JW: This may sound like a strange question, but one of my personal missions in light of my own work and forthcoming book is to demystify writing, and try to show that the experience of writing is available to anyone, and that writing (though difficult) can even be fun and empowering. Do you enjoy writing?

AH: I think that’s a hugely important question. For too long, the answer was too often, No. My internal critics were so loud I spent a great deal of time arguing against them rather than allowing myself to experience the absorption that time to write can allow if you let it. We live in such a rushed, “productivity” obsessed culture that the pleasures of listening to and heeding the quieter voices in our head can seem almost entirely lost. But it’s such a vital form of being. And, as you say, not solely for professional writers. 

JW: And finally, the question I ask everyone: What’s one book that you think maybe not enough people know about and that more people should read.

AH: My answer varies by the week, but this week, I’d say, The Rediscovery of America: Natives Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk

Previous recent author Q&A’s:

The Name of This Band is R.E.M. with Peter Ames Carlin.

Echo Chambers of Our Own Devising with Charles Baxter.

Crime Novel? Women’s Fiction? Literary Thriller? with Kelsey Rae Dimberg.

Everybody Is Secretly Grieving with Alison Espach.

Observations Within Landscape with Ben Shattuck.

Teddy Wayne on Writing and “The Winner.”

Accomplishment vs. Achievement with Adam Gopnik