Authors: Bel Canto

Ann Patchett (50 page)

BOOK: Ann Patchett

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SA:
Well, that’s what being a writer
is all
about.

AP:
Yes,
absolutely. [Laughter]

SA:
Unlike some authors I’ve known, who basically
want their publisher to operate like a kind of souped-up Kinko’s, you seem to
really enjoy the give-and-take of the editorial process.

AP:
It’s very important. My friend Elizabeth
McCracken, who is completely invested in my fiction as I am invested in hers,
edits my books for me. She’s the only person who reads my work while I’m
writing it and I take whatever she has to say very seriously. Originally the
book had a first person prologue and a first person epilogue, both by Gen —
which then implied that the whole book was written by Gen. The basic theme of
the prologue was, “This is the story of how I met my wife.”
Elizabeth
told me to get rid of the prologue.
What she told me, and I think this is absolutely right, was that I had a fear
about pulling off the third person narration, so I had stuck in a first person
prologue so that I could say, “What looks like a third person narrative really
is not.”

The biggest achievement of this book for me,
the thing that I am most proud of, is the narrative structure — that kind of
third person narrative that I think of as Russian, wherein the point of view
just seamlessly moves among the characters. That was the hardest part of
writing the book. It was what took me so long. It’s the thing I’ve wanted to do
since I started writing fiction.

SA:
That makes a lot of sense, because Gen as
narrator would have seriously unbalanced a story about the finding of
friendship and love, I think. Much of
Bel Canto
is
dedicated to his learning to translate these emotions for himself. Take
Fyodorov’s declaration of love for Roxane: it had the wonderful effect of
thrusting Gen into the professional role that Roxane occupies — that is,
professing emotion,
not
just processing information. It’s
an interesting reversal of that
Rusalka
passage,
because here Gen must confront the fact that while he knows what he’s saying,
he understands how to communicate the emotion of what he’s saying about as well
as Roxane understands
Czech.
It’s also a useful prelude to what is, finally, a surprise in the epilogue. But
let me ask you, because these matters of meaning and interpretation seem so
well funded — does your interest in translation stem from your own experiences?
Do you speak or read any other languages?

AP:
Well here you go, there’s the really
penetrating and embarrassing question.

SA:
Withdrawn!

AP:
No, no — because something this book grows out
of is my enormous shame of not speaking any other languages. I can do a hotel
and restaurant French, and a hotel and restaurant Italian, but I don’t have
another language and it’s something that I really, really dislike about myself.
And of course the other thing is that I have no talent or training at all in
music —

SA:
I was going to ask that next.

AP:
I think of these qualities as being two great
measures of what it means to be a cultured person, and I completely dropped the
ball on both of them. Truly, the writing of this story comes out of that shame,
and wanting to examine it and make peace with it.

There are all sorts of things that I set up for
myself to do when I write a novel. But in the end they don’t have anything to
do with the story. That was one — coming to terms with my musical and foreign
language deficits, and the other one, which is more important, was to try to
find a way to grieve for the things that you read about in the newspaper. Because
once we get into these big numbers — plane crashes, earthquakes and typhoons,
hostage situations and school shootings — we see it and we experience it for a
second and then we abstract it. It’s too far away, or there are too many
people, or it’s not a circumstance we could ever be involved in. And so, as we
were discussing earlier, we forget all about it.

But I was so moved by the Japanese embassy
story and it took place over such a long period of time that I really got to
think about what was happening there. When the guerillas were all shot I really
did want to experience it. I wanted to find a way to take some time to feel bad
about that loss. I’ll never know what really happened. I can be pretty sure it
bore little resemblance to what I heard on the news. Still, I wanted to find a
way to experience it, to take emotional responsibility for it.
On a moral level.
To be able to say there’s been a real loss
and I need to stop and grieve for these people.

* * *

About the Author

ANN PATCHETT is the author of three previous
novels,
The Patron Saint of Liars
, which was a New
York Times Notable Book of the Year;
Taft
, which won
the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize; and
The Magician’s
Assistant
. She has written for many publications, including the
New York Times Magazine, Village Voice, GQ,
Paris
Review,
and
Vogue
.
She lives in
Nashville
,
Tennessee
.