Historical Fiction: 2009: April 2008 Archives

Tony Horwitz's new book, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, was released yesterday. You can read The New York Times's review of the book and profile of Horwitz, here. From his publisher, Random House, you can hear an .mp3 of Horwitz reading from the new book.

We're looking forward to Horwitz's contributions this January, when he'll join us for HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth.

There's an excellent discussion of Marilynne Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping (1980), going on right now at Reading Room, the New York Times blog which hosts two-week-long online panel discussions led by editors of its Book Review. Participants include Allen Gurganus, who, together with Robinson, will join us in January as we examine HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth. I read Housekeeping for the first time last week. What follows is how I found it.

Housekeeping tells the story of two sisters growing up in the isolated western town of Fingerbone. Madness runs in their family, and men are mostly absent but for the memories adumbrated by fading photographs, dried flowers, and unread letters. Their mother's suicide has delivered young Ruth and Lucille to the care of her sister Sylvie, a drifter, whose "housekeeping" is a hodgepodge of inabilities to come to terms with domesticity. When the girls are still quite young, Sylvie's child-like capacity for make-believe makes her an excellent playmate; they become close friends and confidantes. As the girls grow older, however, they become more aware of Sylvie's aloofness from ordinary human society. They battle over an allegiance to Sylvie, on the one hand, and the pressures of societal norms, on the other. It's the story of sisters torn apart by adolescence, overwhelmed by the complexities of an adult world, handicapped by a family history riddled with unexplained absences. Here's Ruth, our narrator:

When did I become so unlike other people? Either it was when I followed Sylvie across the bridge, and the lake claimed us, or it was when my mother left me waiting for her, and established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain. Or it was at my conception.

This is a mysterious book, a fiction which feels as if it could be fact, a tale of a human family rendered exotic by tethers to an other-world. "All this is fact," Ruth tells us. "Fact explains nothing. On the contrary it is fact that requires explanation." Robinson was a poet before writing this novel, and it shows in lucid, elusive prose wedded to a story of life as apparition. It is a gem, and gem-like, reading like the spare and opulent product of considered elisions, yielding luminous glimpses.

Go to the Reading Room for the New York Times discussion of Housekeeping.
Buy the book.

We've just confirmed the addition of two novelists for next January's Seminar, HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth. Elizabeth Gaffney is a former editor under George Plimpton at Paris Review, a translator of German literature, and the author of Metropolis, a post-Civil War story of love and crime set among New York City's immigrant communities. The stereopticon image above of immigrant men working as streetlayers came out of her research for this book. Visit Gaffney's author page on our site for links and more information.

Peter Ho Davies is a Guggenheim Fellow, a faculty member of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, and the author of The Welsh Girl, a novel set in and around a POW camp built by the British during WWII in the remote mountains of northern Wales.

We will continue to add more writers for next January's Seminar. You can find the up-to-date roster here, with links to information about each author. Tickets are still available for the event, however we do expect to sell out early. Register for the event here.

I think writing about history is not unlike writing science fiction or certain other genre novels that are outside the present time and reality in that they actually sometimes serve as more effective metaphors for what's going on in the present world. I am very interested in that. And the way that you can talk about a world that has a lot of structural similarities to the present but is very different— in some ways be more honest, be more probing, or simply because of the distance from people's contemporary reality, push into certain corners that otherwise might be uncomfortable.

—Elizabeth Gaffney, from an interview with Robert Birnbaum.