Interview Roundup: Handler, Boyle, Rosen

I'm a big, big fan of Daniel Handler, and so are many of the site's visitors, based on my server stats. So we'll all be thrilled by the NYT profile by Julie Salamon, which catches up with Handler as he promotes the latest Lemony Snicket book, an indie film that sets Rigoletto in a modern workplace, and the forthcoming Lemony Snicket flick. Among the interesting revelations is a discussion of how A Series of Unfortunate Events is influenced by Handler's family history; his father and grandmother fled Germany in 1938.

For me the central lesson, over and over again, was the sheer unaccountability of fate and where you might end up. That definitely drives the Snicket books. In a lot of children's books if you behave well you're rewarded and if you behave badly you're punished. But anybody who tells a story about getting out of a country by the skin of their teeth, it's not because they were braver or more charming or better people. It's because somebody looked the other way or didn't bother to search the hollowed out heel of a shoe.

The Newsweek interview with T.C. Boyle has been out for a while, but I'm still interested in his thoughts on Alfred Kinsey. "When people heard I was working on a book about Dr. Kinsey and sex," Boyle notes, "I think they immediately pictured something like The Road to Wellville where we’d have a slap-bang kind of comedy surrounding some bizarre medical treatments." Apparently it's not like that, and it though A.O. Scott was slightly disappointed in the "blurry, hasty, unfinished quality" of the novel, it certainly sounds like it'll be worth exploring at some point. (I have to confess that I'm only a sporadic Boyle reader, and have never really given him the sustained attention he no doubt deserves, but at least I feel guilty about it...)

Jonathan Rosen talks to Nextbook about his new novel, Joy Comes in the Morning, and he says that even though his wife is a rabbi, the female rabbi protagonist was actually more inspired by the character of Dinah in George Eliot's Adam Bede. He adds:

I was conscious of how unhelpful what are seen as traditional Jewish novels were in writing Joy, because they're all about the flight from religion, not an embrace or a dance with it. So many Jewish writers take ethnic definitions over religious definitions of the Jewish self. It's now at least possible to understand that there isn't such a great separation between the writer and the traditional Jewish world. You can move in and out of it.