Eight years ago, you thought “The Lay of the Land” would be the final book in the Frank Bascombe series. What do you think has made you go back to Frank again (and again)?
A number of forces were acting on me. First, of course, was the force that Thoreau was referring to when he said that a writer is someone with nothing to do who finds something to do. I qualified, as I mostly have for years. Second was that during the promotional tour for my last novel, “Canada,” a surprising number of people who showed up to have books signed said, quite touchingly (to me), that they wished I’d write another Frank Bascombe book. Now, neither of these things ought to compel anybody to write a book, and they probably didn’t. But they affected me.
What did compel me was Hurricane Sandy. My wife, Kristina, and I were in New York when the storm came along, though we didn’t suffer. Afterward, we drove down to the Jersey Shore—the scene of many Bascombe episodes—and I was so affected by the storm’s destruction of human life and expectancy. I drove home that day with sentences skirling in my head—sentences that I recognized as Frank Bascombe sentences. Neruda said of the instigating experience of a piece of imaginative writing, “Something kicked in my soul.” And, although I don’t believe in souls, I do believe in something kicking somewhere that becomes a call to language. That happened to me. And what that kicking was about, I decided, was a curiosity regarding the effects of the storm on peoples’ lives—effects that the broadcast media wouldn’t uncover. And that’s what I set out to do with these four stories. Emerson said that “nature does not like to be observed.” I thought that the imagination—mine, in this case—could perhaps do some observing of what otherwise wouldn’t be noticed. newyorker.
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