I drop by Susan Minot's New York apartment while she's in town to do
some readings for her latest novella, Rapture, which depicts a brief sexual
encounter between Benjamin and Kay, who resume their clandestine affair after a hiatus of
several months . I know that she has a home up in Maine, and I wonder aloud if she
divides her time equally between the two locations. " I spend much more time there," she
smiles. "A little bit of this goes a long way, so a week here every other month is fine. I
lived in New York for a long time, and found it very rich and fascinating, but I don't need
the stimulation anymore."
RH: When you first concieved of Rapture, it was as a very
short story, not a short novel.
SM: Right, about three or four pages. The original conception of two people,
who were sharing the same experience but with completely different ideas about what was
going on, is a bit of a cliché, but I thought I could do it in a new way, and it turned
out that the only way not to have it be a cliché was to make the two people fuller
characters. I did initially question how much I wanted to get inside these characters, but
the more I wrote, the more interestingthe phenomenon of people staying in situations that
they know are bad for them became to me. It takes a lot of psychic energy to tend to
something like that, the way they justify it by saying they didn't mean to, or it's not as bad
as they think... particularly in an urban setting where you can have these...it encourages
obsessions or compartmentalized experiences where other people don't know what's going
on with you.
As I started writing more, I thought about doing a Rashomon type of story, where
you hear her version of an event, then his version, with him reflecting back from the
present to the start of their affair, while she started from the beginning and moved forward.
So it would be a criss-cross that intersected at an event in the middle. But when I wrote it
that way, it became too confusing, so I decided to have them both remembering from the
beginning.
RH: Your last novel takes place over a weekend, and this one is down
to a half hour or so...
SM: I'd say about ten to twelve minutes.
RH: Right. So the external timeframes are increasingly compressed,
but your interior timeframes, your characters' thought processes, have
greatly expanded.
SM: I read Martin Amis's review of Iris recently, and he talks about how
it's become accepted that movies deal with the external while literature deals with the
internal. Obviously they can both go either way, but in general that's where literature can
go best, into someone's interior life. Other art forms can deal with the interior, but I don't
think it comes across as directly as it does in writing.
When I first started reading literature, that was one of the first things that struck me. I'd be
reading something from the point of view of a character in a totallyy different place, and
there'd be an expression of a feeling that I would recognize, when I thought I was alone in
feeling that way. That kind of connection is not just satisfying. It gives you a railing on
which to lean throughout your life, to recognize that you're not alone, especially
concerning things that are very diffciult to express. Things that, if I didn't write, I probably
wouldn't express to myself either. That's what started me writing, and the more I realize
that literature is the only place the interior life can be fully expressed, the more that it's
become a focus in my writing. Otherwise, where else would you see it?
RH: You faced a challenge while writing the story, to create a sexual
scenario that was depicted accurately but at the same time didn't distract
from the bigger story you wanted to tell.
SM: Ideally, it would be great if this story could be erotic as it feels to Kay. So I
tried to put little slivers of that, so you could remember that she's in a heated-up state. But
it's like putting too heavy a spice--I ended up pulling back and focused on the other layers
of experience.
RH: Once you were done writing the story, and started showing it to
your agent and your editor and so on through the chain, at some point,
when people ask you what the story's about, you have to address the fact
that...
SM: ...it's a 150-page blow job. (smiles) When I was writing it and
would mention it to people, they woudl be very titillated and imagine that the story would
be very sexually intense. But it's ended up, now that I've been on tour for a couple weeks
now, that if anything it's a de-titillated story. It's not about the blowjobness of it all. It's
about the psychological torture these characters are going through. So the blow job has
become the backdrop rather than the focus, which is probably a disappointment to some
people, but it's appropriate to the story I wrote. As powerful as sex is, it's sometimes the
background for working out other issues.
RH: It's interesting to watch the reviews, and the hoops they often
jump through to describe the central event.
SM: I did a television interview in California, and the woman told me that we
wouldn't be able to identify the sex act on the air. Well, okay. It doesn't really matter. The
only reason I chose that particular act is that I wanted them to be in an intimate situation
without going at each other to such a point that their minds were totally in the clouds. It's a
pensive moment for both of them; she's doing her thing and he's just laying back. I liked
playing with the usual depiction of a blow job, where the guy's getting off while the
woman does all the work, so I switched it around. He's not turning it down, but he's not
getting off on it, either.
RH: Over the years, you've painted and written screenplays. When you
were starting out as a writer, did you know you wanted to work in other
forms?
SM: I always wanted to work in movies, and I've always painted. Writing pretty
much won out because it was the thing I did most obsessively from the time that I was
thirteen, in part because it was the easiest thing to do. I could pick up a pen and start
writing in the middle of the night, or riding on a bus, or just walking along the sidewalk.
The more I did it, the better I knew it.
RH: Your first collection of poems is coming out this spring, but
you've been working on your poetry for about thirty years now.
SM: Working on them makes it sound like it's a project. I've been writing... and
they always felt like something that wouldn't see the light of day. They were things for
myself, or for conveying a message to someone else. But after a while there were so many
of them, I thought I'd like to try to make them strong enough to go out on their own, so I
took a chunk of a very larger selection, and whittled that down to the poems in the
collection.
RH: It may be reaching a bit, but since your fiction gets more and more
compressed, maybe that's influenced by the poetry...
SM: Believing that this novella was going to be four pages definitely helped me
to start writing it. If I'd set out to write it as a novella, it'd be like swimming in a huge pool
looking for something. When it was just a puddle, I felt as thought I could find everything
in it. So when I think small, it's easier for me to expand on it.
RH: What have you read recently that you liked?
SM: I'm reading Richard Ford's short stories right now, and a friend of
mine has a book coming out in a couple months, Malaise by Nancy
Lemon. It's a great comic novel. I recently read The End of the Story, by
Lydia Davis, which was actually a lot like Rapture. It's about a woman
who's had an affair with a much younger man, and she's writing about it
much later, but she's also writing about how she'll write the novel based on
their affair. So it's as much about the writing about the affair as it is about the
affair. Oh, and Reading Chekhov by Janet Malcolm is fantastic. Chekhov
is one of my heroes, so any new information about him is fantastic.
