Jerry Stahl’s Weird, Dark American Heart

Jerry Stahl wants to tell you about “the weird, dark palpitating heart of America,” as it appears in his new novel, Pain Killers:

“I always loved writers like Celine or Terry Southern—in those ‘extremes’ you can really see the heart of the normal,” Stahl said when we met up for coffee recently. That appetite for literary extremes comes through loud and clear in Pain Killers, the plot of which revolves around a private investigator (Manny Rubert, from Stahl’s earlier novel Plainclothes Naked) who’s hired to go up to San Quentin and figure out if a 97-year-old inmate with the German accent could really be Josef Mengele, with a sharp detour into the world of fundamentalist Christian pornography. “It’s almost impossible to shock anybody these days,” Stahl reflected, noting that many of the most “outrageous” elments of his story are based in real-life stuff he uncovered during his research: “You can find Mengele fan sites online if you look hard enough… Our reality is so skewed that the seething roiling madness underneath is leaking through a lot more.”

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7 April 2009 | interviews |

Literary Crosstraining With Laura Lippman

“Last year was insane, and I still feel like I’m trying to catch up,” Laura Lippman tells me as we chat in a café next to the offices of HarperCollins, which has published her novels under the William Morrow imprint for the last 15 years. In addition to writing Life Sentences, a stand-alone novel about a bestselling memoirist whose research into a criminal case involving one of her former classmates digs up all sorts of unsettling information, Lippman also agreed to write a 15-chapter serialized novella starring Tess Monaghan, the reporter-turned-private-eye Lippman introduced in her debut novel, 1997’s Baltimore Blues, and has stayed with for several sequels—interspersed with stand-alone novels, to be sure, but never in such a compressed time frame. (And that’s not even counting the short story collection, Hardly Knew Her, that came out last fall.)

When she was invited by the New York Times Sunday Magazine to write a serial, she sought the advice of two writer friends, Michael Connelly and Ian Rankin, who had previously taken part in the project: “I was hoping to be told it was okay to blow it off,” she laughs, but they assured her she really ought to take the paper up on the offer. So, although she doesn’t usually work from an outline, in order to make the serial fit into her schedule, she worked out the overarching narrative for 11 of the 15 chapters—but, to keep things surprising for herself, she decided each chapter would have its own mini-story…which she’d only discover while she was writing. She does, however, confess to slightly “cheating” on the serial format, in that she wrote the entire novella in advance, rather than on a week-by-week deadline. “I’m just too fond of revision,” she says.

“Life Sentences is one of the toughest books I’ve written,” Lippman added. “There were some really depressing days during the final draft.” She’s worked with the same editor, Carrie Ferron, since Baltimore Blues, and describes Ferron’s guidance as Socratic: “Carrie will tell me something is needed, but she won’t tell me the solution… For this novel, I took all the memoir sections [written in Cassandra’s voice] and put them in one document, and it came to 14,000 words. That was way too much.” She edited the material down by nearly half—6,000 words gone by the time she was through— “It was hard, but it was absolutely the essential thing to do. I’m always trying to acheive that feeling you get when every single word on the page absolutely has to be there, that it had been weighed and tried and earned its keep—and, sure, there’s plenty of times when that didn’t happen, but I still keep trying.”

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23 March 2009 | interviews |