Moving John the Baptist from “Opening Act” to Headliner

Brooks Hansen’s new novel, John the Baptizer, was published just shy of two weeks ago, on John’s feast day. But when we met in a café near the offices of his publisher, W.W. Norton, to discuss the book, he confessed early into the interview that he had not been a big fan of the Baptist attending Mass as a child. “I didn’t really buy this guy,” Hansen recalled. “He seemed angry, he seemed cartoonish… he felt like an opening act. What you’re taught to understand about John doesn’t make sense when you’re a little boy—his willingness to point at Jesus and then withdraw. It was only in returning to the story later in life that I felt compelled by him.”

(For more about what drew Hansen to John’s story, be sure to watch the video interview embedded above or on YouTube.)

There are some distinct challenges to building a story around John, however. “The second you make him the central character,” Hansen explained, “Jesus becomes the bad guy, the guy who comes in and steals the spotlight.” In fact, one of Hansen’s primary sources for his version of events was the sacred writings of the Mandaeans, a religious group that reveres John the Baptist as its greatest prophet and Jesus as a false messiah who betrayed John’s teachings. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that Hansen’s novel contradicts Christian doctrine. “Even the most controversial aspects of the story I’m telling are found in the Gospels,” he said. “And John’s story concludes before Jesus’ death and resurrection, so you can explore John’s story entirely without having to address the central Christian issue.”

In addition to the Mandaean scriptures and the Christian gospels, Hansen also drew upon the Roman historian Josephus (particularly when it comes to the Herods). Altogether, he spent seven years writing John the Baptizer, although he admits some of that time was spent working on another project. “But the only way of getting away with this was to tell the story as if I knew it like the back of my hand,” he confided. “You can’t shoot from the hip with this story.” As far as I’m concerned, he’s done a fantastic job—in prose that recalls the majesty of scriptural language but remains modern enough to engage contemporary audiences. But don’t just take my word for it: You can listen to Hansen reading excerpts from the novel on YouTube, starting with the fate of John’s head.

5 July 2009 | interviews |

Ben Greenman on Keeping It Real

New Yorker editor Ben Greenman recently published a new novel, Please Step Back—just before it came out, he spoke with my friend Melissa Kirsch about the ways in which the Web has altered journalism—alas, often for the worse.

Melissa continues:

“It’s harder to build a body of work slowly, over time…without a million little snap judgments all along the way. While in the past those snap judgments would evaporate, now they’re preserved in digital amber,” notes Greenman. He says we should stop fretting over “print/electronic opposition” and focus on the more crucial issues of authority, frequency and identity, which persist in every medium.

Greenman approached the writing of his novel with a journalist’s M.O., researching the bejesus out of the book’s subject, funk music. But regardless of genre, his intention is the same: “If I’m writing a ‘Shouts and Murmurs’ for the New Yorker, a current-events musical for its website, a literary short story or a book, I’m always thinking about the same themes: creative parentage, emotional fidelity, how people connect and disconnect, the uses of delusion, and the importance of making the world superficially comic to hold off the things about it that are profoundly tragic.”

14 May 2009 | interviews |