I have read all of Jessica Francis Kane’s books, so I guess that makes me a fan, but even as a fan I wasn’t quite prepared for what she pulled off with her new novel, Fonseca, which takes a real-life event in the life of legendary British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, and spins it into a world of its own.
I laid out more of my thoughts and feelings on the book in my review at The Chicago Tribune, but this still left me with many questions about how Jessica had pulled of this feat.
She graciously indulged my questions for this conversation.
John Warner: In my review I tried to articulate how Fonseca is very much like a Penelope Fitzgerald novel, but it’s also clearly not written in a way where a reader would think you’re trying to ape Fitzgerald. It’s similar in effect without being identical in affect. I’m wondering if this is anything you thought about as you conceived the book?
Jessica Francis Kane: I thought about it so much. I knew I didn’t want to impersonate her, couldn’t impersonate her; that would have been a terrible mistake. But I wanted to try to capture her sensibility, the habit of thought that made her write the way she did. One of the ways I went about this was by rereading her nine novels in the order she wrote them, and as I did so I underlined every sentence I thought contained a clue–something characteristic of her, maybe something autobiographical. I transcribed all these sentences into a document on my computer I titled “The Lines,” which made a kind of crazy scaffolding–sensible only to me!--on which I began to build the voice of my Penelope in Fonseca. When her daughter Tina read the finished manuscript, she sent me a wonderful letter about how much she liked it. In that letter she said, “You have somehow been able to write in her voice and at the same time your own. I was captivated.” That meant so much to me.
JW: You tell the origin story for the novel in the author’s note at the end, your personal discovery of Penelope Fitzgerald’s work when you and your husband moved to London in 1998 and he bought you a copy of Offshore since you were residing in the territory of the novel, and then your intrigue over this untold story of her adventure in Mexico. You say, “The relationship between history, biography, and fiction interested Fitzgerald. It interests me, too. Seven years ago I decided to use all three to try to write the story of the Mexico trip.”
Did you have to convince yourself that this was a good idea for a novel or were you confident from the get-go that you could pull this off, because as I say in the review, I see it as a daring attempt?
JFK: I had so much convincing to do! To take on my favorite author and an English literary legend? I was terrified. Very early on I decided to go down to Austin to see her archives at the Harry Ransom Center. I didn’t expect to uncover some overlooked historical material. I was certain Hermione Lee would not have missed anything! I just thought it might bolster my confidence to see Fitzgerald’s notebooks, her handwriting, her manuscripts. I took Hermione Lee’s biography of Fitzgerald with me (a book I had read and reread and stuffed with Post-it notes) and on my last afternoon in the archive, who should tap me on the shoulder and ask what I was doing with the Penelope Fitzgerald boxes but…Hermione Lee! It was unreal, but it felt like a sign from the universe (or Penelope herself?) that I was on the right track.
JW: You obviously did all your Fitzgerald homework, reading her work, reading about her, etc…but how do you take that background research and then turn her into a character for a novel, particularly in light of a public persona that was perhaps not consistent with her truest self (as Alexander Chee points out in his review of Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life)? You invent so much in the novel and then have to have this invented version of a real person respond to these events. It’s not just WWPFD? (What Would Penelope Fitzgerald Do?), but what would this character in this situation do, right?
Or not right?
JFK: Yes, that’s right. I think I benefitted from working with a young, pre-novelist version of Penelope Fitzgerald. In 1952, when Fonseca is set, she is 35 years old, a mother with young children, not yet the famous novelist known for creating a protective public persona. In 1952 she wants to be a writer, but it will be 25 years before she really begins writing. I was very compelled by that long wait, the tension between her ambition and the difficult circumstances of her life that would delay her work for so long.
I also followed clues from the single short story she wrote that seems set in a place like Fonseca, “Our Lives Are Only Lent to Us.” I think this story contains some of her own thinking about what she saw in the expat community of Saltillo of that time, the comedy and the tragedy of two cultures misunderstanding each other. So I could put my young Penelope in a similar situation and say, Now, what would she do?
JW: Valpy, Penelope’s precocious son is kind of a scene stealer. Like his mother, he’s also a real, still living, person, but my feeling is that in the novel he’s largely an invention. Where did Valpy come from?
JFK: In an interview late in life, Fitzgerald said she didn’t understand the criticism she had sometimes received that the child characters in her novels were too precocious. They were exactly like her own children, she said. I loved that and used it. I also borrowed and blended the characters of Ben and Dolly from The Beginning of Spring (her own favorite of her novels, and more autobiographical, I believe, than has been widely discussed) and Jonathan from At Freddie’s. They are all wonderful, clever children doing their best in an often nonsensical adult world.
JW: How exciting was it to discover that Edward Hopper and his wife, Jo, would have overlapped in terms of being in the same region at the same time as Penelope Fitzgerald?
JFK: So exciting and also, again, terrifying. Given Fitzgerald’s own interest in and knowledge of art (she published a biography of the pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones), I knew it was an opportunity too good to ignore. But I had only just resolved to write a version of Penelope and now I had to write the Hoppers, too? When I told Tina and Valpy that Hopper had been there and sent them a link to the watercolors he made, they were so pleased to see them and agreed it was an intriguing possibility. And so I began to read about the Hoppers, and the more I read, the more I realized they were another version of an artistic marriage, in some ways similar and in some ways different from the Fitzgeralds. But the double portrait was something I wanted to try and capture.
JW: You’re an established, veteran writer now, with a passel of books that you’ve seen from conception to completion and publication. This book was literally years in the making, and I’m wondering how that feels not so much around the cycle of publishing - which I think is often anticlimactic - but from your sense of your own labor. Fonseca was your work (or at least a good chunk of it) for a long time. Now it isn’t. How do you negotiate this shift?
JFK: It is a very real shift, isn’t it? And I’ve been having more trouble this time around. I don’t know why exactly. One reason, I think, is that with Fonseca I feel the weight of representing not just this novel but Fitzgerald’s work, too. I have been surprised over and over again by how few people have read her. My elevator pitch for the book has evolved from starting with her name to bringing her in only at the end if the person seems interested. I’ve written elsewhere about my worry that her literary legacy is lagging behind her contemporaries, namely Spark and Brookner, and I don’t understand why. But back to your question, as the days pass and I begin to hear from readers who are inspired to read Fitzgerald after reading Fonseca, I’m starting to feel better. And the very best is the readers who were already Fitzgerald fans who have written to say they feel like Fonseca is a gift for them.
JW: And finally, my last question for everyone: What’s one book you think not enough people are aware of that you think they should read?
JFK: Perfect Agreement by Michael Downing. John, have you read this novel? (Note: I have’t read Perfect Agreement, but I have read Downing’s Still in Love, which is great.) I think you would love it. It was published in 1997 by Counterpoint Press and I think it should be ranked among the great novels of academic life. The main character, Mark Sternum, is a college professor who teaches grammar at Boston's McClintock College ("An odd job for a college professor," he is told, "but no one else seems to be doing it"). Mark’s struggles to navigate 1990s-era academic political correctness are entwined with his obsession for the lost world of the Shakers. It is full of wit and compassion and is so smart about issues of community and justice. I wish more people knew about it.
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The Name of This Band is R.E.M. with Peter Ames Carlin.
Echo Chambers of Our Own Devising with Charles Baxter.
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Everybody Is Secretly Grieving with Alison Espach.
So excited to read Jessica's new book (I'm a big Fitzgerald fan too - her novels...the best.)
Love PF, JFK, Fonseca and this interview! Thanks for doing it!