RH: There's also a lot of real details crammed in here; for example,
Mayor Giulani has a significant cameo appearance.
CH: This is not the tourist version of New York, or the sitcom
or hour-long drama version of New York. This is a New Yorker's New
York, and if I'm going to pull this off, I have to be able to satisfy the
standard of New Yorkers. As far as I'm concerned, that's the only
standard -- I can't have anything wrong about where things are or
what people are doing there. The facts are actually pretty easy to get
right, though; it's the sensibility and the total set of observations
that's difficult. If I can please a New Yorker with my representation
of the city, I think I've done a good job.
RH: I noticed the little plug for Poison in the middle of the
book, and that reminded me to ask you about life being married to
another writer.
CH: We've been married for a long time now. We read each
other's work. We're very different kinds of writers, but still very
supportive of each other's work. I'm very very proud of my wife and
couldn't imagine not being married to a writer at this point. We've
built our whole life around the rhythms of writing. When one
person's working hard on his or her book, we know that the other
person can't be. Kathryn mostly works during the day, and I mostly
write at night because my schedule is filled with my day job at
Harper's. We have to coordinate our lives, but it's really not that
much different from other married couples who both have careers
that are taking them places.
I'm starting work on my new book, and just yesterday I gave my
wife the first long section of pages to read, with a few questions, and
the interaction really wasn't between two spouses as much as it was
between two professional writers who trust each other and care
about the other's opinion. It's very satisfying to me to be with
somebody like that.
RH: How long did you spend writing the novel?
CH: About three years, nickel-and-diming the time around the
magazine responsibilities. I took a couple week-long stints here and
there. But this is what I've always done. I've always had a job and
written around it, so I'm used to it by now, even if it isn't getting any
easier.
RH: Do you see yourself wanting to write full-time, or do you
always see yourself doing something else?
CH: Well, I love my job, the magazine I work for and the
people I work with. It would be a crushing grief to have to choose
between that and the writing. I don't want to choose, and I don't
intend to choose. I intend to do both as long as I can. I have
satisfactions as an editor that are comparable to my satisfactions as a
writer. It's very gratifying to work with good writers and to get a
good article into the writing.
RH: It seems to me that being an editor, particularly at a magazine
at the level of Harper's, gives you the opportunity for solid
relationships with writers, talking with them about words and ideas,
that as a writer one would deeply appreciate.
CH: Writing and editing aren't, ultimately, divisible. There are
skills and utilities as a writer that I make use of as an editor, and
being a writer myself, I can talk to other writers as a writer as well
as an editor. As an editor, I can bring that overdeveloped critical
mechanism to bear on my own stuff, which isn't to say that I don't
need other people's eyes, because I definitely do.
It's like swimming in a pond. Over at that end, there's one kind of
fish, over there there's another, but they're all in the same pond
together. On the plane over here today, for example, I was reading
some of my wife's new book, working on my own novel, and doing
stuff for Harper's, switching back and forth constantly.
RH: One of the things that's always fascinated me about writer's
minds is our ability to develop that kind of functional non-linearity
in our thought processes.
CH: As an editor, you're trained to hop around a lot, to jump
into unfinished projects, work on them, and jump out then into
another project. That's just the nature of the business.
RH: As somebody who works in new media, it strikes me that
hypertext and the Web are in part literalizations of the way that
many of us already have learned to think. Porter, for example,
juggles a lot of narrative threads together, some of which end early,
some of which he returns to after long absences. There's also the
matter of the videotapes which Wren watches in order to learn much
of the story.
CH: In some ways, Porter's a pre-digital version of what's
possible now. He hops around between different stories on paper, but
it's a form of hopping that a lot of people know how to do now, on
the web. And using those videotapes...the videotapes as objects are
part of the story, but they're also part of the zeitgeist, and I feel
comfortable that readers can deal with the sequence of disjunctions
that they make in the story. They enjoy and ingest those
disjunctions, while still being able to keep track of the larger
storyline.
But I'm not one of those people who think that the infinite hypertext
linked story is going to be that interesting to readers. The reality is
that there are some people who know how to tell stories and some
people who don't. The people who tell stories, who care about telling
stories, spend years learning how to fulfill the human appetite for
narrative, for resolution. I don't see a human appetite for
irresolution, unless you count channel surfing.
RH: So the best storytellers are the people who can draw a pattern
out of the chaos?
CH: In some ways that's what I'm trying to do in this book.
There's a lot of chaos in the city, a lot of continuous parallel stories
that overlap at different points. As I have one character say, I'm
trying to tell the one big story in which all the smaller stories are
tangled together.
