Jane Smiley
Interview

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In many ways, Margaret Mayfield is a passive character. She’s a sharp contrast to her friend Dora Bell, the unmarried jet-setting journalist. You’ve made a decision to focus Private Life on Margaret’s inner life, rather than building a novel around a more assertive character. Why? How do you manage to keep the reader engaged with a protagonist who is largely acted upon?

I don’t think of her as passive—I think of her as "good." I think that like many women, then and now, she’s been taught—conditioned—to behave in a certain way—to accept her circumstances and make the best of them, not to ask larger questions, to know that she’s not the boss, to focus on the immediate and the practical. Her mother’s rationale is reasonable for her time—tragedy could strike at any moment, anything is better than that, play a safe game. But I was interested in the costs of that approach as well as the benefits (and there are some benefits). Andrew is eccentric when he and Margaret get married, but circumstances (mainly the change of cosmology away from the Newtonian model) cause his to get more eccentric. Life is a matter of both predisposition and luck. I wanted to explore that. I tried to keep the reader engaged by giving weight to the private matters that were significant to her—sort of a Henry James technique. We all have them. Sometimes they get lost in larger events, but they stay with us.

Your choice of epigraph by Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, serves as bitter irony: “In those days all stories ended with the wedding.” Margaret’s marriage to the troubled scientist Andrew Early is fraught, yet by the end of the novel, she seems to be finally staking a claim on her own life. Is marriage a beginning for Margaret, or an ending?

I would say a beginning, because she is quite unformed when she gets married (but who isn’t?). She does not know what to expect in part because none of the married women around her tell her what to expect, and in part because she has never really experienced a marriage, since her father died when she was quite young. Perhaps she is an extreme case, but perhaps not. We still live in a world of both arranged marriages and misguided, impulsive marriages. Most marriages are a learn-as-you-go proposition. Most spouses aren’t as extreme as Andrew, but most spouses also have their "out there" periods. I suppose Andrew could be diagnosed, but I didn’t want to do that, I wanted her to experience him, and us to experience him through her consciousness.

The characters Margaret and Andrew are based loosely on your distant relatives. You took some elements of truth from their lives for use in the novel and left others behind. Why did these relatives inspire you? How did you determine which facts to use in your fiction?

Margaret is almost entirely fiction, because I never knew the aunt, and my relatives only had a few anecdotes about her. I also never knew the uncle, but there is stuff about him on the web, and he still has a presence among astronomers and physicists as the sort of scientist a young person does not want to emulate. At the same time. I’m surprised that the original of Andrew hasn’t resurrected himself upon the discovery of "dark matter" and declared himself vindicated yet again.

You begin Private Life with a scene that features the Kimuras, a Japanese family that Margaret befriended before WWII, now interned in a prison camp. Then you take the reader to Margaret’s childhood. What about this family and Margaret’s relationship to them made it suitable for framing the story?

One of the few things I knew about my aunt was that she loved oriental art. Since she lived in northern California threw the 20th century and into WW2, she could not have been a lover of oriental art without also knowing about the Alien Land Law and the other anti-Japanese movements, and then, of course, the internment of the Japanese. So if I was going to include the oriental art, I had to include those things, too. Margaret and Andrew are very aware of their American-ness, but in different ways. To me, that was a signal mark of the 20th century—Americans taking center stage. I think it is important to ask, so what did we do with that, and what does it tell us about ourselves?

In Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, you quote Virginia Woolf: “The author’s job is to preserve exceptional moments, not to award them to exceptional people.” To this reader, an exceptional moment in Private Life for Margaret is when she discovers the depth of her love for her son: “It was as if he were a dye and she was white wool. Looking at him and holding him dyed her through and through.” Do you feel that you awarded many exceptional moments in Private Life? Did Margaret get her share of them?

Maybe Margaret did not get her share of them—maybe the few that she did get filled her with regret about those that she didn’t get. But she got a few. Should she have been braver? What would be the costs of that? Did she get more than Dora? Maybe she got fewer, but appreciated them more because of their contrast to her normal existence.

In an interview a few years back, you said you consider yourself a comic writer. Would you stand by that today? If so, how does that play out in Private Life?

Andrew is pretty absurd, and I have had people tell me that they laughed while reading the book at his outrageous behavior. But in this day and age, maybe comic writing needs to step aside for a while.

You’ve written an amazing array of books, including a mystery (Duplicate Keys), a humor novel (Moo), young adult books about horses, and essays on a variety of timely topics that have appeared in top-tier journals and magazines. How do you manage to vary style and tone so effectively?

I have different ideas and interests, and I try to go with each idea and let it develop itself appropriately. It may be a matter of temperament, but it’s the way I work, and also the way I read. I like lots of different types of books, and I admire writers, like Anthony Trollope and Emile Zola, who play in different keys.

Your historical novels include The All-True Travels and Adventures of Liddie Newton and The Greenlanders. Did you approach historical fiction and research the same way in Private Life? Do you think any one of these was more successful than the others in evoking the spirit and complexity of its time period?

I think The Greenlanders immerses the reader more totally in that world, but that world is also more alien than the other worlds. Readers who love The Greenlanders really love it, but many find it off-putting and hard to get into. So in some ways it would have been more accessible if I hadn’t used such an archaic style. But style in a historical novel is the key choice, and you have to either mimic the style and thought of the day (the purist approach), or go for the objective simpler style, and maybe lose historical verisimilitude. Hard choice. Only the reader can decide which he or she prefers. If you work is quite various, as mine is, then there are always readers who are disappointed. Luckily, they are never disappointed with the same book.

Of the 100 must-read books that you chose to list in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, which would you most like to have written and why?

Writing one of those books would mean having to have lived as that person. So even though I admire lots of the books, there’s no writer I would prefer to have been. The great thing about the novel as a form is that each author’s oeuvre is utterly idiosyncratic. I love many authors, but would I want to work as hard as Trollope or be murdered, like Zola, or never get on a horse, go through WW1, like Ford Madox Ford, or have Virginia Woolf’s mental problems of George Eliot’s depressions? Live in a cork-lined room, like Proust? No. Maybe if there was a novelist who was always effortlessly funny—Nancy Mitford? But she had a difficult life, too. So, no. They can keep theirs and I’ll keep mine.

Looking up on the old bookshelf, I see you once wrote the forward to an anthology of first-published stories by famous writers (First Fiction). Do you still recall the specifics of your first published story?

Of course! I invited a gay friend over to dinner, and later fantasized—what if someone did that, and seduced him, got pregnant, and had to confess? So I wrote it up, and one day, sitting at a reading in the Writer’s Workshop, I passed it surreptitiously to my best friend, and just at the wrong place in the reading, she burst out laughing. Naughty but fun! I was on my way.

Will your next novel be historical fiction, mystery, humor, nonfiction, or young adult? Or will you strike out in an entirely new direction?

I’ll never tell.

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