A Conversation with Jane Smiley

From the pages of our May/June 2023 Issue.

JANE SMILEY lives in northern California, in the region where her most recent novel, A Dangerous Business, is set. Her published works range widely, as is evident in her forthcoming book of essays, The Questions That Matter Most, to be released June 6. Smiley, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992, is one of the featured speakers at the Authors Guild Foundation’s 2nd Annual WIT Festival this fall, whose theme is “Changing the Narrative.” If there was ever a shining example of an author who has changed the narrative in so many ways, and whose narratives have been changed for the big screen and for the stage, it’s Smiley. We talk to her about changing the narrative, her beginnings as a novelist, her interests, and some of her favorite books and writers.

A Thousand Acres, which won the Pulitzer, was made into an opera last year. Your book changes the narrative of King Lear. What other ways have you changed the narrative? Two short stories in The Questions That Matter the Most are good examples. One is what I think truly happens at the end of The Metamorphosis and is called “Greg: My Life as a Bug.” The other is one I wrote for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. A book I read in order to write 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel was Marguerite de Navarre’s L’Heptaméron. It was her take, her changing the narrative, of The Decameron, which had been written about 200 years earlier. I wrote a short story called “Marguerite of Navarre gives Ophelia Some Advice.” It’s a series of letters back and forth—Marguerite of Navarre is trying to help Ophelia solve her problems so she won’t get into big trouble with Othello.

What is it that draws you to Shakespeare’s writing? It’s partly because we had to read Shakespeare plays when I was a kid, starting in seventh grade. I didn’t really understand them, but I was interested in them. And then when I grew up and wanted to be a writer, there was a way in which his ability to be prolific, and also to jump around among different forms, was a role model for me. I noticed the other writers that I love, like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, had a regular way of doing their books. But Shakespeare was always trying this and trying that. Sometimes it would be weird. Sometimes it would be horrifying. Sometimes it would be fun. And I eventually read all of his plays. And I thought that was a really good model, because I wanted to write a whole bunch of different things. One of the interesting things about King Lear was that, unlike many of his other plays, like Romeo and Juliet, it was quite Nordic, instead of Italian. When I was in college, I studied Medieval languages. And then when I was in graduate school, I did a lot of Old Norse. We read a lot of Icelandic sagas. And then I went to Iceland. I can’t exactly remember where I learned about the Greenland colony. We did read in the sagas about the discovery of the Greenland colony, and we knew because of archaeological evidence that it ended. But I really, really, really wanted to write a novel about what might have happened in the Greenland colony. My earliest ambition was not to rewrite King Lear; it was to write a kind of saga of the Greenlanders. I did various things in order to learn how to write it. One of the things I did was write a murder mystery, because I knew I needed to know how to figure out. So I wrote Duplicate Keys. I knew The Greenlanders was going to be really long. I knew it was going to be written in a kind of archaic tongue because I read so much Old Norse. One of the things that struck me about Medieval languages was that they weren’t about what I feel as if it as it belongs to me. The feelings seem to come to them from outside.

How so? In Old Icelandic, you didn’t say, “I felt unhappiness.” The grammar would say, “Unhappiness came upon me.” I had to figure out a way to communicate to the modern reader, through language, how it would have felt to be a person living in Greenland in the late-Middle Ages. I knew that I had to write in an archaic style. It took me a long time to figure it out, and it does turn some people away from that book. But I found that it eventually became kind of mesmerizing to be writing in this weird style. So that was a lot of fun. Then, the next book I wrote was Moo, which was a comic novel based in a land-grant university. That was a completely different style. That was a comic style of today sort of thing. It was fun for me to jump around among different styles and try and do different forms. That’s been one of my big pleasures.

You cover a lot of territory, a lot of writing styles, as you said. It takes a certain type of person to do that. You’ve got 17 adult fiction novels, two short story collections, five nonfiction works, several YA novels. How do you do it? I grew up being curious—listening through walls to my relatives talking to one another, that sort of thing. When I went to high school and college, there were so many things that we learned that made me more curious. One of the things I really love to do is to take walks, look around, eavesdrop, try and figure out what people are talking about. And then, one of the things you do when you are curious is you sort some kind of logical system, like a story, that makes sense of what you are listening to, or watching, or reading for that matter. When it came to A Thousand Acres, the thing I was curious about was what it felt like for Goneril and Regan to be going through what Lear is going through, or what they’re going through simultaneously to what Lear is going through. I always felt that Shakespeare never gave them a voice. Somebody had to. So that was what motivated the Lear book.

Which of your books is your “special child”? It’s possibly Greenlanders simply because it was such an unusual experience. But I’m very fond of each one of them, for different reasons. I was fond of Moo because it just made me laugh. I’m fond of Lidie Newton, because I think she’s an enterprising young woman. She learns a lot in the course of the book, and I came to feel that she was sort of my friend. I’m fond of Horse Heaven because I loved all the horses and I loved going to the racetracks and meeting all the people that were in the racing business. I’m fond of Perestroika in Paris. That was probably the most amusing one to write. And I actually didn’t think it would get published because it’s just so playful and kind of weird. I kept working on it because it meant that if I worked on it, I could go back to Paris and do a bunch of research. It was way more interesting to do research on the west side of the Seine than it was to hang out in the normal spots because the landscape is much different and there’s various wonderful museums, one of them is the Balzac Museum.

What is it about the Balzac Museum (Maison de Balzac) that you enjoyed? If you go there and look at Balzac’s writing pages, you’ll say, “I’m so glad I’m writing now rather than then.” His handwriting was really tiny, and every correction had to be handmade. What a wonderful experience that is to go there. It was also fun to write A Dangerous Business, my latest novel, because even though I go to Monterey all the time to shop, visit friends, and stuff, it’s a totally interesting town to live in because they’ve maintained the original buildings very well. So you can really get a sense of how it felt to walk down that particular street or to walk up another particular street that ends up in a pine forest.

What is it like to see someone else’s interpretation of your own work? They made The Age of Grief into a movie called The Secret Lives of Dentists. I thought it was way better than the book. A Thousand Acres, I thought they did a good job, especially the two actresses. But I was disappointed because they told me that they had approached Paul Newman to be Larry, but he turned it down.

Who are some of your favorite writers? My favorite novels are actually pretty obscure. It’s the Transylvanian Trilogy by Miklos Banffy, set in what’s now Bulgaria, essentially in Yugoslavia in the late-19th century. He does such a wonderful job of depicting the landscape. You really do feel like you understand what it feels like to be there. The plot is great. The characters are great. I grew up reading Dickens and George Eliot. I loved Middlemarch. We didn’t read Jane Austen school, but I read her on my own. I grew up reading Agatha Christie. That’s another one I read on my own. I was introduced to Shakespeare but also to Trollope later. Zola. I love Zola. Some more favorites are Geraldine Brooks, Horse; James Shapiro, The Year of Lear; David Hacket Fischer, Bound Away; Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—for Now; all of Alice Munro’s stories; and Gabriel Byrne, Pictures In My Head, the audio version.

Did you always want to be a writer? I wanted to be a jockey. That became evidently impossible as I grew up. My mom wrote. She was the women’s page editor for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. There was always a typewriter on the dining room table. So I saw that there was this possibility of writing. I loved reading, and she was really good at not bothering me. I read under the covers with a flashlight late at night. She never told me to stop. She was really good at getting me books from the library, letting me read whatever I wanted. Mostly, I wanted to read The Bobbsey Twins, or Nancy Drew. She never stopped me, never guided me. She just let me read, read, read, read, read. And then I went to a high school in St. Louis that had a great English program. When I got to college, I didn’t exactly want to be a writer. I didn’t know what I wanted to be at that point. But my senior year in college, I decided to try writing a novel, and I really enjoyed it. And then, around Christmas time, I picked up Our Mutual Friend and read the whole thing overnight in one night. I was so fascinated by Dickens’s style and how he depicted the characters. In my view, that’s his best book, and it really won me over, and I just thought, Well, why not? I’m gonna do it.

How has fiction changed? Oh, Kindred also is a really great book. It shows that people are writing more about what they want to write about and imagining many different types of stories. Fiction is much more diverse than it used to be. When I was starting out, you had to either want to be Philip Roth or Mailer. I didn’t want to be either one of them. And where were the women? Well, Jane Austen was dead. George Eliot was dead. If we wanted to be female writers, we sort of had a few models, but they weren’t treated by the publishing industry or the newspapers as important in the way that Mailer and Roth and their fellow writers were. In some ways, that was good because that let us choose what we wanted to do. One of the best things that happened to me was that when I was in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I made a really good friend. After she left, she didn’t want to be a writer. She wanted to be a publisher. She went to work as an editorial assistant for a guy at one of those publishing companies. When I finished writing Barn Blind, it happened that her boss was having Freudian analysis every day, five days a week. So he said to her, “You can buy what you want. You just can’t spend very much money on it.” I lent her Barn Blind, and she liked it. She bought it and published it, and that was the kick-start of my writing career.

You care deeply about social and environmental issues. What is foremost in your thoughts? The most pressing issue is climate change. But in the world that we live, in America, all the issues are so intertwined with defiance. “You can’t make me do that.” Whatever “that” is. So, it interests me where that sense of defiance and refusal comes from. Sometimes I just throw up my hands and say it can’t be fixed. And then other times… I found the midterms a relief. I’m also very concerned about the huge human population and what kind of demands that makes on the ecosystem. What would it feel like to just check out of the techno revolution? Not talk to anybody over Zoom and not use a computer. At the moment, I’m supposed to be writing a piece about Louisa May Alcott. I’m reading a biography of her by Susan Cheever. There’s Bronson Alcott standing right in front of us, 150 years ago saying, “Be a vegetarian.” We know exactly what he would be like, in our day. He would be like this guy in our neighborhood who lives off the grid since the 1970s.

What do you enjoy doing besides writing? I knit. I’ve knitted way too many sweaters. I always say I’m looking for a knitting victim. That’s a person that you can knit a sweater for. Then you knit the sweater for them, and they never wear it.

What are some other things you enjoy doing? I have two horses that I tend to. One of them is not in very good health, so I don’t ride her, but I usually ride the other one. It’s been so wet that we can’t use any of the arenas or anything. I go for a lot of walks. I love to cook. And read.

You have been a member of the Authors Guild for a while. What do you see as the importance of the Authors Guild? Most authors are fairly isolated. The Authors Guild gives you an opportunity to connect and to discuss the ongoing issues of being an author. There are a lot of pleasures to being an author, but the sense of how you’re being paid, what kind of money you’re capable of earning, that stuff goes up and down. Authors have to be able to get together and discuss how to deal with that stuff—how to deal with the publishers, how to deal with Amazon. One of the things that fascinates me, when I was reading Dickens and then earlier and later authors, is the way that authors get their books out into the world is constantly changing. The kind of books that readers desire, that’s constantly changing, too. You have to have some sense of what the changes are, you have to talk about them, you have to come to an under- standing of them. And I think that’s what the Authors Guild is really good for.

—Anastasia Stanmeyer

The 2023 Words, Ideas, and Thinkers (WIT) Festival will be September 21-23 in Lenox. The theme is “Changing the Narrative.” Topics include artificial intelligence, fake news and the threat to democracy, Mrs. Dalloway at 98, cryptocurrency, unreliable narrators, and more. Speakers confirmed so far include Michael Cunningham, Patrick Radden Keefe, Rita Dove, Martin “Marty” Baron, Jane Smiley, Isaac Fitzgerald, Saeed Jones, Margaret Verble, and Jonathan Taplin. Get the latest information on the festival and be added to the mailing list at authorsguild.org/wit-festival.