Author2Author: Naama Goldstein & Pearl Abraham, pt. 1

Last week, while Pearl Abraham was sending us dispatches from her appearance at the Virginia Festival of the Book, she was also fielding questions about her latest novel, The Seventh Beggar. And she was giving back as good as she got, asking Naama Goldstein about the short stories collected in The Place Will Comfort You.

Naama Goldstein: I'm very curious about the narrative form of The Seventh Beggar, which seems to emerge out of a dissatisfaction with existing expectations for sensual and psychological representation and dramatic development and flow. There is the sense of a more dispassionate perspective in your book than in the eye (and gut) level depictions of what I think of as humanist modernism. You address this explicitly early in the book, when you write, "For the twenty-first century, the pretext of represented reality and the containment within one consciousness are too restrictive. Hence a straightforward insertion--"

I'd be interested to hear more about the thinking that led to this statement, as well as the novel's texture, and how it might tie into your sense of our hyperlinked times.

Pearl Abraham: In the twentieth century, stream of consciousness was the breakthrough in narrative and, it seemed at the time, a truly modern, representation of the inner mind. (Think of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysses.) Today's mind doesn't usually sustain that kind of continuity, which is akin to the extended monologue you might hear on stage; in other words, to the modern ear, this construct feels artificial. I might even question whether extended, focused stream of consciousness narration was ever a true depiction of a mind at work. I believe our minds are much more hop-about and easily distracted, though very capable of layering and interweaving disparate thoughts and ideas. Sometimes the incoming variety itself can benefit the thinking by bringing something new into the picture. Such human capacity, which is absolutely necessary today given the amount of information we receive in any given moment, lends itself to non-linear narrative and to composite structures made up of different genres and sources, to different times, and so on.

The sentence you quote introduces the first insertion of an excerpt from Arthur Green's biography of Nachman of Bratslav, whose tale inspires The Seventh Beggar.The main character, Joel Jakob, is engaged in reading the biography and rather than force Joel to think about it afterwards only in order to key in the reader, I made a decision to allow the reader to experience the biography the same way Joel does, that is, to read it directly. The alternative, which is a rather old-fashioned narrative strategy, seems to me much more forced and has a whiff of the clumsiness found in unskilled writing, when a character says something to another character, though they both know it, only in order to provide the information to the reader.

About your idea that there is a dispassionate perspective in the book: I don't think you're talking about a lack of emotional or psychological life in the book, because the novel depicts plenty of raw emotion and also psychology. I think that what you're sensing is the presence in the novel of a narrative voice that provides another perspective, what Wayne Booth (in The Rhetoric of Fiction) refers to as a narrator's "aesthetic distance," which, as in the example you offer, allows the narrator to step out and introduce the biographical insertion. For a long time in writing workshops of the 90s, such a maneuver was largely frowned on as an interruption of the fictional dream, and this rule limited and circumscribed the writing produced in writing programs. Some of the greatest novels of the 18th and 19th century used narrative commentary freely; without Laurence Sterne's intrusions, for example, Tristram Shandy wouldn't be anywhere near as entertaining.