Your novella “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?” opens as a boy is floating on his back in a pond. We gradually come to learn that he’s part of a wealthy extended family gathering for the summer at the family’s estate in New Hampshire. When did this character, Chip, first come to you?
My parents live on an old farm in New Hampshire, all apple trees and ponds and turkeys in the fields, though it’s a far humbler version of the estate in the story. A few years ago, my family renovated my parents’ little barn into a house so that we can stay for the summer to escape Florida’s heat. We spend a lot of the day floating in the pond, which is so brown with tannins and rich with newts that it’s a little disconcerting; I always feel afraid I’m going to hurt a newt or two when I dive in. The pond is spring-fed, so always cold, but sometimes the July sun will heat the pond to bathwater-warm for the top foot, and, if you float long enough on your back, looking at the sky, it’s not impossible to feel as if you’re slowly turning into a newt. One day, I came up out of the water thinking of one of the sons of fortune I’ve known, a party guy who never really panned out the way that his family expected, and the two elements, pond and black sheep, converged and became Chip.
The novella is told in the third person, and we primarily see events through Chip’s perspective. The first part focusses on the late afternoon and evening of one July 4th, and you then move through Chip’s teen-age and college years swiftly, before we return to him in his mid-twenties, when the life that has been expected of him is collapsing. Had you mapped out the novella before you started writing? How do you know when to slow down and when to speed up?
I tried to write this as a short story for a few years before I capitulated to the scale that the story needed, and let it be the novella it always was. I tend to think about a story for a few years before it has fleshed itself out fully in my mind, and only then do I write it down. When I was trying to force the novella to be a short story, I had already thought through the characters and the rough events, all of the elements were in the same place—it was told the same way—but everything was so compressed that there was no oxygen in the story. Time is the subject and material of fiction, and playing with time—pleating it, bending it, cutting it—is one of the great joys of writing. In any event, I tend to speed up when I want temporal texture and a change in momentum.
Did you always have this title in mind?
I didn’t. Over the two years that it took to write this story, I called it “Pearl Spang.” The character’s name comes from Vine bakery, in my neighborhood, where I sometimes go to work; there’s a painting of a wintry landscape in one of the bathrooms signed by the artist, Pearl Spang. Every time I saw the name I had a little jolt of pleasure, and would go back to my work singing “Pearl Spang Pearl Spang Pearl Spang” under my breath. Though I’ve looked the painter up, I can’t find anything about her. At last, with the final few drafts of the story, I remembered a children’s game we used to play called “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?,” and then, finally, the title did what a title should do, which is to push back at the story and send it wobbling on its axis.
We published your short story “The Wind” earlier this year, which follows a mother and her children escaping an abusive husband. Do you see “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?” as a companion piece?
I do think of this novella as a companion piece to “The Wind,” but mainly because in my fiction over the past few years I’ve been thinking about the violence that’s foundational to American culture, and, often, the ways this violence is manifested in our ideas of masculinity. This kind of writing sometimes feels less like thinking and more like pressing down hard on a painful bruise, which I probably can’t stop pressing because I’m raising two boys, and seeing my sons become young men in this culture is terrifying.
Your fourth novel, “Matrix,” will be published in September. It’s set in the twelfth century, and is about a young Frenchwoman, Marie de France, the illegitimate offspring of royalty, who is sent to England by Eleanor of Aquitaine and becomes the prioress of an abbey. You couldn’t get much further away from Chip’s New Hampshire estate. What was it like to immerse yourself in Marie’s world?
To a reader, the stories would certainly seem distant in subject matter. To me, though, the same obsession with American violence and masculinity was an engine that drove the writing of “Matrix,” which took place over the gross and vulgar Trump years, loudly animated by a stupid and swaggering violent masculinity. I wanted to get as far away from Trump’s America as possible—so, a twelfth-century convent, a flawed female utopia—while also looking hard at what I see as the precursor of so much of the religious intolerance, white-male supremacy, imperialism, and climate disaster that we’re faced with today. So much about the dying American empire can be articulated by remembering that America is the unchecked outgrowth of the Crusades that took place a millennium ago.
