Interview with Frederick Reiken
Conducted by Abby Holcomb
Frederick Reiken is the author of three novels, including the Hackney Literary Award-winning The Odd Sea and the forthcoming Day for Night, which will be released April 26, 2010 by Reagan Arthur Books of Little, Brown. His short stories have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Glimmertrain and Gulf Coast. Mr. Reiken has received much critical acclaim for his work, including a recent listing as one of The Daily Telegraph’s "10 Rising Literary Stars of 2010." Formerly a news reporter, columnist, and nature writer, he currently serves as the director of the Graduate Program in Writing at Emerson College and lives in western Massachusetts.
Abby Holcomb:
Your prose style has been described, in various reviews over the years, as "spare," "precise," "unsentimental." What the reader takes away from your work is your confidence in letting a story speak for itself, void of the flourishes and tricks that many authors use to wring emotion from a tale. Who would you consider to be your literary influences and how has your style evolved
from your first novel to your most recent, Day for Night?
Frederick Reiken:
I find it a tricky thing to name literary influences because at some level it is a very subconscious thing, at least for me. It’s more like I notice who seems to be influencing me, as opposed to, say, being conscious
of emulating anyone in particular. So, I may have a different response to this question by the time I finish my next book, but my latest hunch is that Tim O’Brien has been a very important influence. Reading certain works
by O’Brien, I suspect, helped me to recognize the possibility of creating stories or novels that are composed of discrete blocks of time and space rather than being one continuous dramatic context or time frame or character point-of-view.
That particular approach seems to suit my sensibility very well. Even The Odd Sea, which has the most unified approach of any of my books, proceeds as a series of seven tightly framed chapters, each with its own story arc, rather than as continuous dramatic experience for the protagonist.
It was written, however, before I had read anything by O’Brien, and back then I would have said my big influence was the Australian writer Tim Winton. So, another thought about literary influences is that often those authors who you might call influences are writers whose sensibilities are in some way
similar to yours to begin with, and it’s not so much a matter of influencing your style as "bringing it out," because you recognize certain possibilities in your own work based on having read the work of someone who has gone further than you in a direction that you are already headed.
As for how my style has evolved – I think it’s tied to an ongoing realization about how to construct novels that are somewhat unconventional stylistically but still engaging on a story level. As you said, I’m most interested in letting the story speak for itself, without imposing
any sort of personal agenda, and I keep looking for new ways to do that. More and more, a constellation of characters seems for me almost necessary to the stories I want to tell.
Much has been made of your rich descriptions of both northern New Jersey and the Hilltowns of western Massachusetts. In fact, one interviewer commented that your settings were as much characters in your work as your protagonists. Day for Night takes the reader on a trip around the globe, hitting places as diverse as Florida, Salt Lake City, the Caribbean and the Israeli desert. What is your relationship with each of these locales?
A place can be animate and have specific characteristics, including metaphorical ones, and characters can have very strong relationships with specific places, but in my mind, for a place to be a literal character, it would need to be an active agent in the story. I suppose there are occasions when that happens – maybe Egdon
Heath in The Return of the Native? – but it’s not the case in my novels, I don’t think.
I do, however, feel that a strong sense of place has been important to my work as a presence that often defines the context of the story, and in that regard it was interesting to work with a mix of different settings in my new novel. As for my relationship with the various locales in Day for Night – I am intimate with most of them.
For instance, I spent the year after I graduated college working as a wildlife biology field technician in the Negev Desert, Israel. I was being paid to research the population dynamics of Persian onagers, a species of wild ass, in the central Negev. I also spent a summer studying coral reef ecology on St. John, in the Caribbean, and I’ve been back
there several times since then, so that is another place I know well. In each case, imagining these places gave me something to attach the story to. In most instances, I discovered the characters as a result of this act of conjuring the place up in my mind. That was certainly the case with Jordan Kahn and Dara Wilson in the chapter entitled "The Ocean," which
was originally written as a story and was the first part of the book I wrote. I remember sitting down to write and thinking about a particular place on St. John that I know well – a rocky peninsula known as Yawzi Point – and suddenly, there they were.
You have been asked before whether any of your stories contain autobiographical elements and you responded that "most fiction writers are alchemists, in the sense that we take the base metals’ of our usually unspectacular lives and try to turn them into fictional gold &we conjure up engaging characters and plots that become vessels for the emotional dimensions we are forever trying to come to terms with." Considering recent controversies regarding the genre of memoir, can you comment on the ways that fiction really is different from memoir.
I kind of wish I hadn’t said that thing about the fictional gold. It sounds a little over the top to me now. But my beliefs about how fiction writing is unlike nonfiction writing are still more or less the same. When you write fiction, you invent and conjure and project on the screen of your imagination situations that were not necessarily part of your actual
life, and you inhabit characters who are not necessarily you, even if you have certain things in common with them. You make up stories or situations that can come to life vividly in your mind and you invent characters that you can see objectively as "others," even if some of those others do in some way resemble yourself. What most fiction writers find, I think,
is that we can channel certain deeply felt aspects of ourselves into those imagined/invented characters and situations with a kind freedom that we would not have with a memoir and, paradoxically, find ways of representing ourselves that are less obvious and direct but potentially more profound than what we’d get with a literal translation of our own lives.
Memoirs do, of course, rely on this same kind of imaginative projection, but the raw material is the recollection of literal events. The distillation of those events is what becomes the narrative – usually in the form of a story that is simultaneously an examination of the content and meaning of that story. There is inherently a need for some authorial translation
of the events of a memoir, whereas in a novel the story can just stand on its own and be whatever it is, without secondary elaboration. The trick, of course, is that of inventing interesting enough characters with an engaging enough story premise, but what is happening in a purely story-oriented novel is not meant to be a literal representation or evocation of something beyond it.
The story might reference or direct you to other places or events that lie beyond it, but it exists in one place only – on the page.
Meanwhile, a memoir is by definition an evocation and recounting of a personal story that correlates to events that took place in the actual world at a certain time. It may not even be so much a story as an examination of some topic (e.g. a tragedy, an illness, a journey, a triumph against great odds) as seen through the lens of one’s own personal life experience.
In this regard, memoirs are an important literary vehicle for someone who has a life story that is inherently interesting, as well as for writers engaged in a compelling personal exploration of some kind. I should add that there are writers who, quite simply, are at their best when writing memoirs. I’ve read some great ones, and the fact that there has been a
lot of controversy pertaining to this genre in recent years does not mean it should not be discounted as an important literary form.
Strong themes seem to be prevalent in your work. In fact, characters in all three of your novels seem to operate inside the space created by loss. When you sit down to write, do you begin with a theme and tailor a plot to explore it or do you work out storylines that you find later to be saturated with certain pathos?
I usually begin with a situation that I find interesting and one that I can imagine my way into. It’s a lot of trial and error, in my case, and half the things I try never make it beyond a few scribbled paragraphs in my writing journal. Loss and absence tend to be recurring themes, but I’m not consciously trying to craft stories around those themes. They just tend to all go that way. As for the pathos, it seems to be what I thrive on as a writer.
In The Odd Sea, the entire Shumway family, especially Philip, seems to grapple with the fact that they are in the midst of a story that doesn’t have an ending. The characters in Day for Night, are also preoccupied with what we call narrative: chains of events, the task of writing one’s life, making connections, making sense. "Stories are like dreams in this way. They happen. They do not happen. They are right here. They exist some other place entirely," writes Amnon, who narrators the last section of the novel, entitled "This World." Can you comment further on the human desire for narrative and some of its larger implications.
This is a central question in Day For Night, both in the content of the book and the structure, which unfolds as ten first-person narratives, each narrated by a different character. One of the things I was exploring in this novel was the human need to perceive lived events as narratives and the manner in which lived events, once narrated, become "textual." As soon as something is rendered as textual, we immediately, at the most primal level, begin to look for patterns that will allow us to make sense of it. There is a character in the novel who claims that if you look hard enough into the history of anything, you will find certain things that seem to be connected but are not. This is true. It’s also true that we will find things that are deeply connected, sometimes in ways that are beyond our immediate comprehension. Stories are magical vessels because they transport you to places that are not part of the actual world in which we live but at the same time allow you to inhabit a textual space that, in the best of scenarios, also does not fail to point you back to your own actual life in a way that may cause you see it in a different light. As human beings, I think, we continually have to negotiate this flux between the real and the imagined and, more than this, we have to be willing to question even those things we have long considered to be fixed realities.
Day for Night begins with a quote by Jorge Luis Borges: "This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in other I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist." What made you decide to allow your reader to see the entire web you have created, while keeping your characters often ignorant of the connections?