by A. D. Mira
Another thing I tried to do in making Delaney a naturalist was to talk about the ethos of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath in terms of 1995, when we have five and a half billion people on the planet. To someone like Delaney--to me, for that matter--the enemy of everything that we hold dear is us.
HFR: In this book you play a lot with names and the symbolism behind some of that names: Candido, his wife America, Delaney's last name [Mossbacher], and Arroyo Blanco, the white upper middle class enclave where Delaney and Kyra live. As a writer, what are the pros and cons of doing that--what do you see as some of the advantages and some of the possible dangers?
TCB: I think those names are subtle. And I think they fit, especially in the context of a fable, where you have a moral revealed at the end. Of course, I would never want to interpret that for the reader--they can make of it what they will.
The danger, I suppose, would be in drawing too much attention to the character's name, so that you would get a sort of Pilgrim's Progess kind of allegory, which I didn't intend at all. Candido and America are both fairly common first names in Mexico, and America's name has a lot of ironic resonance because we tend to forget that there are other Americas besides our own. And Candido, of course. . . like many of my characters, he is the guy, like Voltaire's Candide, who gets all of these problems heaped upon him. . . . One of the things I've been reading from the novel in public has been the little incident in which Candido gets the free turkey and accidentally sets the forest ablaze. Readers of my work will know that when he gets the turkey and he feels, "this is my lucky day and I'm so happy," that that's not going to last for long.
HFR: Wasn't Mike Bender trampled to death by an elephant in an earlier story?
TCB: Ah, good reader, good reader. The way I defended that in my own mind, because I couldn't resist using Mike Bender in this one too, was maybe that story happened after this one too. . . .
HFR: . . . Yeah, I was thinking that too. . . .
TCB: . . . Even though I wrote it first! No, I knew that would be a problem in terms of the mythology of all the characters I've created. That's how I explain it to myself--yeah, Mike died a year later. . . . Although really some of the details of that story would set it pretty firmly in the time that I wrote it, which would be about, I guess, '93. . . .
HFR: Which details do you have in mind?
TCB: When the young girl talks about killing and how Bridget Bardot and the New Kids on the Block are against it. It's inevitable that you do place a thing in its time context.
And another problem with this book in terms of its time is that I was predicting the fires that swept through the canyon, and I was writing about those fires as they were happening and had planned to write about them well in advance; and I had planned also to have an illegal immigrant set off the fires. The case with the real fires in Topanga Canyon was that it was an arsonist. But at the same time there was a firestorm in Altadina which had been set by an illegal immigrant from the Middle East who was just cooking his dinner. So I kind of had predicted some of those things, and I wondered how I could set that into its time frame. A couple of people who have reviled me in print with this are not very close readers and have somehow mistakenly felt that there's an earthquake in the book. I do mention the earthquake that had occurred, and that kind of puts it in its timeframe, because that was January of '94.
HFR: The L.A. Times reviewer called it an earthquake at the end, but it was just a mudslide, right?
TCB: Yeah. I haven't seen that review, but I've had some parti selecti read to me, and again, some people are just out to tear me down no matter what, and they have preconceptions about the book. I think that review, the one in Time magazine and the one in the Washington Post are unfair, because reviewing, supposedly, is disinterested; that is, if you know the person you're reviewing, or you have some bias for or against them, you're supposed to beg off. But these people are taking this opportunity to give me every shot they can unload. I don't think it's right, but again, you really can't respond to that. Most of the criticism of this book and of other books has been favorable. You win some and you lost some. I've always been worried about the reviewers because they are sometimes not really capable, I don't think, of understanding what I do. They're often second-string writers themselves, as in the case of the people that we've just mentioned, who are harboring a lot of jealousies and animosities for anyone who's making it.
Also, I think sometimes they're not deep readers. I'm always stunned when people don't get the fact that the book is satirical. For instance, they don't really get it, they don't understand what I'm doing. They would take Jonathon Swift's Modest Proposal and they would say, "This man is evil, he is a child-killer and a cannibal." They just don't get it. That kind of surprises me that the editors would let that go through, that kind of, really, character assassination and personal attacks.
On the other hand, if it's some second-stringer who loves me I don't mind. So I guess you have to take your lumps when they come, and it was inevitable that they would come now, because, as I say, people are very jealous of my status, and they feel that this is a weak moment because this is an issue book and they can line up, self-righteously, on whatever side of the issue they feel is the right one.
But, of course, I reserve my favorite British expression for them: "I piss on them from a great height." You know, who are they? I've never heard of any of them. I have total confidence in my vision and in what I'm doing--the next book is already ready, I've written seven new stories. You have to let it slide off your back, I guess. But it does hurt, that people are so malicious and so unwilling to even read the book closely enough to find out what happens on a factual level--they're so quick to take a chance to take a shot at you.
HFR: The reviewer in the New York Times Book Review ended by calling you "perhaps the most contemptuous of modern novelists."
TCB: (laughter) Well, he's welcome to his opinion. Again, this is another inveterate second-stringer who may have a little bit of jealousy seething between those lines, I think. He's also a guy who doesn't seem to understand what satire is. If I recall this was the guy who thought, felt that all the Mexican stuff was very moving and correct, but I was too hard on the white characters. Well, if you read between the lines, maybe it hits a little too close to home for him, makes him reevaluate his own feelings and his own prejudices in a way that makes him angry. Angry at whom? Moi.
What can you say? The guy doesn't understand that satire has to hurt somebody, it has to have teeth in it. I don't think that the behavior of the guy standing on the street corner with the bag of oranges needs that much correction--he's just trying to survive. But I think the people behind the gates and the walls, the people who are writing these reviews, for instance, maybe they need to just reevaluate for a minute when they condemn a whole group of people carte blanche because they don't know them, they're worthless Mexicans, Guatemalans are worthless, they're ruining our country. I would take this reviewer and put him in that category of those people, and I think maybe my book cuts a little too close to the bone, which says to me that I'm doing my job.
I had a great off-hand compliment from one of the fact checkers at The New Yorker recently. You know how fanatical they have a reputation for being--well, they are. I had a story out a couple of weeks ago called "She Wasn't Soft" set in Santa Barbara, and in it a minor character is described in very precise detail. He's named "Little Drake" after a famous surfing spot, he's got a very specific and unique physical description, and what he does and who he is and how he hangs out in bars and what his job is and so on. The fact-checker wondered if publishing this would discomfort any barfly in Santa Barbara, and I pointed out that I don't know anybody like that, it's purely an invention, every detail. So I was tremendously thrilled by that, because she felt that I was using a real person. But in fact those are entirely invented, every character in there. I don't know my fellow writers, I avoid them. It's pure invention.
You know, it's great--you get slammed for doing your
job well. (Laughter.)
HFR: You said satire takes a punch at someone near, and maybe the reviewer didn't like that. Does satire need to take a punch at everybody, or do you see some people above that, like Candido in this case?
TCB: You can do whatever you want--there are no rules. In this case--I think even in the case of, let's say, The Road to Wellville--I think Will Lightbody is the center of the book, he's the Everyman, he's the schmuck to which everything happens, and I think you can say the same about Candido in this book--he has Will Lightbody's role. And I think you can go back to my other books--he has Hiro's role from East is East. Even in Evelyn Waugh's books, there's usually somebody like poor Tony in A Handful of Dust--he's a schmuck and everything happens to him, but you kind of like him because he's the Everyman character. I think in this case that's Candido. As I said earlier, for my purposes, in writing this fable, I thought that he should be that character, so that I didn't want to satirize him in the same way, let's say, that I satirized Delaney and Kyra and the other members of their community in Arroyo Blanco Estates.
Although, again, as I said, I didn't want to make a false picture of him either. People don't believe that--that's not credible if he's perfect and he's saintly. I think he's very real. I think all the characters are real. I disagree with the guy who felt that I'm too disdainful to Delaney, because in part I write these books as a cautionary tale for myself as well, to curb my own tendency to say, "Oh yeah, these Mexicans, they're crowding our street corners." I want to say, "Wait a minute, what are you talking about?--these are human beings like you." There's part of me in Delaney, certainly, just as there is part of me in Candido.
HFR: I notice all the characters you're referring to in your previous work are from your novels and not from your short stories, and that's understandable to a large part. In your mind, how do you think of your short stories versus your novels? When you think of one of your short stories--you can choose one--how do you think of it, what does that story mean to you? If it doesn't mean as much especially in terms of the characters, what's notable for you about your short stories?
TCB: Well, they do. More and more the stories are centered on characters, whereas in the beginning they weren't so much, they were more centered on ideas. If I tend to, as we were just talking, refer to the characters in novels, it's because they're developed in much greater length, obviously, so they have more presence to me and to the readers. But I don't really make much distinction between stories and novels--they are all stories for me, whether they're two pages or five or ten or three fifty or five hundred. They're just stories, they just need some more space. And there are little jokes, as you point out, with Bender reappearing--characters do reappear from story to story, like the "Ape Lady in Retirement." I guess talking in larger terms you just think of the characters that are developed in more length.
HFR: For short stories, when you remember writing the story, do you key in on, say, an idea, or some "Aha" moment that crystallizes the story for you where you saw what it was?
TCB: Well you have to discover that "Aha" moment, as you phrase it, and you might not know what that's going to be until you get there. I don't really ever know what's going to happen in a story or a novel--it just has to evolve and work itself out.
HFR: You never have an outline?
TCB: No.
HFR: You just start with an idea and see where it goes?
TCB: Start with a voice, form the idea, and then follow it--very slowly at first, especially, until you begin to get a sense of what the problems are and how this puzzle might resolve itself, and you don't really know until you get to the end. I had no idea that Kellogg would kill George until about a week before it happened.
I think that's part of the magic of doing fiction. If I knew how I felt about Proposition 187 and illegal immigration and could encapsulate that in a phrase in the way that so many reviewers seem to want me to do, then maybe I'd write an essay about it. But I don't think it's a problem that admits of such an easy solution, and I'm simply trying to feel my own way out of the problem. And I think I do--I think it is resolved at the end and I think you know where I stand. But it is a problem that some people who accuse me of not thinking deeply can't even imagine the depths of, especially in terms of the biological imperative and the fact that there are five and half billion of us and that is the problem, and that we are an animal species whether we like to admit it or not, and we're in for some big, big, big trouble, real soon. I think that the more population pressure there is, the more racial scapegoating there's going to be, the more tribalism, the more us-against-them--as evidenced in the O.J. verdict the other day.
Except that by the time we print this, no one will remember who O.J. is.
HFR: In the ending of The Tortilla Curtain: when did you know what the ending would be and did you know that it was the ending whenever you wrote it?
TCB: I knew that there would be this cataclysm--after the fire, always the flood. And, of course, it also echoes the end of The Grapes of Wrath. I knew that had to be, particularly in terms of a fable--I think you pull out the stops, and you're going for a statement the reader can grasp in terms of a moral. So I always realized, early on, that there would be this cataclysm at the end which would result in this final line and this final gesture, which is the moral and the emphasis of this fable.
HFR: Have you ever wondered what Delaney is going to do when he actually comes above the surface and looks Candido in the face?
TCB: I love to think about ten minutes after the novel ends. Candido is going to bring him up onto the roof, they're going to sit there in the rain, and I think if there was another chapter then it would be Delaney's point of view, and he would be reevaluating I think. I think he would be reevaluating. I don't know if it's going to change his behavior back, because in one sense the novel is an anatomy of what racism and scapegoating are. There are two occasions in which Delaney blames a Mexican for having done something that we know he hasn't. And in the second instance, the graffiti instance, he's so far gone at that point when he finally realizes that it wasn't Candido, it was Jack Jr., it doesn't matter--he just forgets about it, it doesn't matter--this guy is evil anyway. I'm just trying to show how that sort of attitude can evolve from a guy who--OK he's a schmuck, but he means well, and he is real, despite what some people may say. He is very, very real. And I think the readers who are coming to the book and responding well to the book realize that these characters may make them feel uncomfortable, but they know these people. He's a liberal, sure, but is he willing to act on it when the time comes? What does he think about when he hits Candido? He thinks first about--is his car damaged, and he thinks about his insurance, then he thinks, "Oh my God, I hit somebody." I think that's very human, sad to say.
HFR: Actually you surprised me with him, because when I first started reading about Delaney, I thought the book would go where he would gradually soften up, become more liberal and start building a bridge towards Candido.
TCB: I think the negative reviews would be not so negative if this were the case. I think that's what they want. I think that's what everyone wants, a kind of icing on the cake, the sit-com, Bunky ran over the garbage can and Sis got a new one before Dad got home and it's over at the end and there's no issues to take, nobody feels bad. I want people to feel bad. I don't want any icing on the cake. I want to rub your nose on it. And again, I'm taking some hits for that. But I stand above it--I don't care. I'm not going to compromise what I do to make some reviewer in New Jersey feel good about himself. That's not my object in life.
HFR: It seems to me that one of the pitfalls about writing fiction with political undertones is that you as the author can always get out of it by saying, "Well, that's not me, it's my character," and so in a sense it's hard to really take anything seriously from a fiction writer if they can invent anything they want. Is this something you dealt with when writing this book?
TCB: You mean, you want me to state a political position, like how do I feel about 187?
This is what some people expect. Some people say, well Steinbeck really is writing a muckraking book. I think things are much more complex today, as I've said, and that was why I wrote the book, to see how it would work out. And I don't always know how I feel. I feel on both sides of the issue--I feel that illegal immigration is wrong, it makes a mockery of legal immigration, it should be stopped. How? I don't know, because we are an animal species, as I emphasized throughout with the parallel to the coyotes and the canyon wrens and everything else, and when times are bad in one area animals tend to migrate. On the other hand, as the book went on, I felt that, despite that, what I object to even more is a kind of racial scapegoating, where, as I've said about three times already, "all Mexicans are bad, they're ruining our society, send 'em back to Mexico." I think ultimately that's how my point of view evolved.
So the good reviews--you mentioned Barbara Kingsolver--I think she is much more committed to a certain cause than I am. I'm not committed to that cause. But that doesn't mean I'm a nihilist, either. I think that some people don't realize that this fiction is more subtle than they take it to be on the surface, because if it's pushing their buttons, they're angry, they're berserk, they think they agree, they disagree--they don't look. And as I said earlier, I think a lot of people, standard daily reviewers, not academic critics, are maybe not capable. They also may not know what else I've done. All they know is my image in the press, and they don't like that. If you look at my ten books, I think you have a real good idea of where I stand on the issues, and what I am and who I am.