In Review: November 3, 1999
Interview with Walter Kirn '83
A book critic talks about Princeton, Mormonism, and his new novel,
Thumbsucker
Since his graduation from Princeton summa cum laude in 1983, Walter
Kirn '83 has studied at Oxford University, worked as an editor at Spy magazine
in New York City, published an acclaimed collection of stories, My Hard
Bargain, and a novel, She Needed Me, and freelanced for various publications.
Six years ago, he left Manhattan for Montana, attracted by the silence and
the barking dogs that keep one from going "too deep into the verbal
jungle." He became New York magazine's book critic and continues to
write regularly for several New Yorkbased national publications from
Montana, where he lives with his wife, Maggie-the daughter of actress Margot
Kidder and writer Tom McGuane-and their 10-month-old baby, Maisie.
Broadway Books, a division of Random House, has just published Kirn's first novel since he moved west and became an outspoken voice on the New York literary scene. Thumbsucker is a coming-of-age tale about a boy named Justin Cobb, "the King Kong of oral obsessives," growing up in Minnesota in the 1980s. In a tightly structured series of connected stories, Kirn paints a darkly funny, somewhat sick world in which dinner is either pellet-riddled pheasant or venison, the mind-altering drugs at hand are cough syrup and Ritalin, and the religion of choice is Mormonism.
On a recent trip east to meet with editors, Kirn dropped by the apartment of Heller McAlpin '77 to discuss his career, literature, and life over coffee and cake. Like Justin Cobb, he is supremely articulate, presenting what he calls "the acceptable face of oral compulsion." Below are excerpts from Kirn's conversation with McAlpin.
Q: How did your experience as a critic affect Thumbsucker?
A: To be brutally honest, if it's done anything, it's made me a bit more self-critical and a bit more self-conscious, though not in a way that I hope shows up on the page. Once you realize just the sort of glut of books that exists out there, it does become incumbent on you not to add to it unless you have a damn good reason.
Q: Do you feel torn between fiction and nonfiction?
A: My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer. At some point I made a conscious decision not to teach-yet-and so the alternative was quote unquote grub street, which I think is an honorable tradition much maligned by the lofty academics of the 20th century. I write for four magazines-Vanity Fair, GQ, Time, and New York-and for each one I try to exercise a different faculty. . . . Being a critic wasn't an aspiration of mine, but it was something I could do from Montana, where I moved six years ago.
Q: Do you fear a vendetta from writers you have reviewed critically?
A: No, because I credit others with what I would like to credit myself with as a critic-which is dedication to reviewing the book, not the person. I like to think that I could praise the good book of someone I personally dislike. I try not to comment on the person, to be insulting, but I have no trouble being insulting to the work.
Q: Tell us about your family.
A: I grew up in a tiny Minnesota town of 500 people called Marine-on-St.-Croix. My father actually went to Princeton, Class of 1960, and was a patent attorney at 3M in Minnesota. My mother, like the mother in Thumbsucker, was a registered nurse. In its vital statistics, the family in the book very much resembles my own. But I get tired of explaining: A writer's like the magpie, he picks everything shiny and brings it back to his nest . . . It's mix and match, exaggerate, distort, delete, imagine-it's not transcribe.
Q: And your Princeton experience?
A: I was a transfer student my sophomore year, from Macalaster College in Minnesota. I really was wet behind the ears. I found Princeton intellectually stimulating but socially bewildering . . . I studied poetry, and I wanted to be a poet. I did what I think may have been the shortest creative thesis in the history of Princeton-it was a collection of poems, about 14 pages long-and won the thesis prize for it. And I remember walking down the hallway in 185 Nassau Street to turn it in and Joyce Carol Oates passing by and commenting, as I remember, "It's rather thin, isn't it?" But none of the other poems that could have gone in it were any good. I mean, it wasn't like I hadn't written a hundred of them, it was just that I couldn't bear to put more than 14 pages' worth in front of anybody.
Q: Why has Mormonism figured so importantly in your work right from your first collection of stories, My Hard Bargain ?
A: Our family was converted to Mormonism for a very brief period, but the experience was singular and memorable. It's a subject that fascinates me-a homegrown religion meant to respond to the nature of life here rather than in Europe, engineered for the wilderness. I think we're still in the wilderness in some ways.
Q: Were you a thumbsucker? Do you consider yourself orally fixated?
A: I decided I was going to be coy about answering that question directly because I knew everyone was going to ask it. And then I decided I wasn't going to be and I was just going to say yes, which is the truth. I've often thought that western history can be accounted for by its oral obsessions-the tea trade, tobacco, coffee . . . Oral obsessions definitely changed the year 1998 for President Clinton . . . It's a pretty restrictive lens, but a pretty amusing one, once you start seeing things through it.
Q: Thumbsucker is at once deeply cynical and cautiously hopeful. Is this your outlook?
A. I think of myself as writing realist American fiction. Cynical but hopeful wouldn't be the worst thing I've ever been called.
Q: What's your next project?
A: I'm writing another novel, called Up in the Air, which arose from a story about a very successful businessman who no longer had a home because he traveled so much on planes. I started meeting these modern, contemporary nomads and realized there's a whole culture out there which disperses our physical presence and allows us to live placelessly. And yet we haven't managed to squirm out of our own bodies yet, so there's a conflict-and it seemed like one I could write a novel about.
Getting Satisfaction from Rock
n' Roll
Sandra Grace Susino '95 left IBM and produced her own CD
Sandra Grace Susino '95's parents didn't take the news too well in November 1998 when she told them she was leaving a high-paying consulting job with IBM to pursue her dream of starting a rock 'n' roll band.
"They were really shocked. My mother's first reaction was, Oh, my God, you'll have no health insurance. Don't think of moving back in with us!" recalls Grace of the talk with her parents back in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Undeterred, she quit the job, assembled a band called Sister Séz, and hit the New York bar circuit.
Susino, known professionally as Sandra Grace, put much of the money she saved from her two years at IBM into a five-song, self-titled CD. She's invested time as well, devoting the last 20 months to shaping and promoting the four-member band (named during a brainstorming session with the group's Brazilian guitarist and cofounder, Zecarlos). Grace didn't push to get Sister Séz a record deal, so the CD is very much a do-it-yourself project. Grace and Zecarlos were the producers, with Zecarlos serving as production engineer. Grace did its Website, www.sistersez.com, and fulfills orders from her Upper Manhattan apartment. She has sold several hundred so far.
Looking back, Grace found the biggest challenge was reviewing and critiquing her own work in the recording studio. "The toughest part was trying to figure out the best quality we could afford," she says.
Grace uses both idealism and scrappy independence to plot a course in this most uncertain of career switches. Her Princeton education made her a well-read "independent thinker," while her family background stoked a can-do spirit. Her father arrived in the U.S. from Italy knowing no English, but built a career as an executive for a computer banking company; her mother, a teacher, played the piano and sang for Grace and her sister.
At Princeton Grace sang with the Wildcats, and while at IBM she tried to start a band, but the workload was too much. Though she's left the corporate world, her high-tech skills remain central to Sister Séz's promotion. In addition to creating her own Website, she's placed the song "Epiphany" on an Internet Website where digital music is available for downloading (www.mp3.com).
She's also used street sense to get the word out. That's why she took a job as a bicycle messenger. "I loaded my backpack with CDs and when I did deliveries to record and TV companies I would leave the CD behind." After two weeks of risking life and limb, she returned to more traditional methods.
And the music itself? The sound is bar-band basic, featuring Grace's earnest lyrics and Zecarlos's ripping guitar riffs. An English major who wrote her thesis on Henry James, Grace often writes from her own uncertainties. "Anything that makes me cry or affects me emotionally usually makes a good song," she explains.
For now, Grace is filling her days with twice-weekly rehearsals, weekly business meetings with Zecarlos, learning about the music business, networking, and keeping the band in the spotlight. "Our strategy as a band is do as much as possible ourselves. We don't expect a record company to step in and save us.
"And if it doesn't work out, thank God I've got a good education."
-Van Wallach '80
Strong Men Keep Coming: The Book of African American Men, by Tonya Bolden '81 (Wiley, $24.95). Idaho's Washington Lake, Washington Peak, and Washington Basin are not named for the first United States president, but for a former Missouri slave who bore the same name. Facts like these salt Tonya Bolden's most recent foray into African-American history, a collection of more than 100 mini-biographies of artists, acti-vists, athletes, and entrepreneurs that is divided into two parts, before slavery and after. Bolden admits her choices for subjects are idiosyncratic, including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. with newspaper publisher Carl Murphy and cowboy Nat Love while leaving out Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. (Astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson, visiting lecturer and researcher with rank of associate professor, makes it in.) Though no bibliography illuminates her sources, Bolden includes suggestions for further reading in several entries.
Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, edited by G.W. Bowerstock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar (Harvard University Press, $49.95). The fall of the Roman Empire and the centuries following it have been viewed as a devastating time by historians, but the editors and writers of Late Antiquity are out to change that. Propelled by recent archaeological finds, their guide presents the period from the middle of the third century to the end of the eighth as a decisive time in which major religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrianism) formed or were refashioned, and empires (the Holy Roman and Islamic empires rising from the Roman and Sassanian) held sway. Eleven essays cover politics, ethnicity, war, and religions, followed by 500 encyclopedia entries on the everyday (water) and the esoteric (Maioumas, a Byzantine aquatic festival). Brown is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton; Bowerstock is a professor of ancient history and Grabar a professor emeritus of Islamic art and architecture, both at the Institute for Advanced Study.
I Pass Like Night, by Jonathan Ames '87 (Washington Square Press, $12, paper). Ames takes readers on a stark journey through New York City's sexual underground as recorded by his character Alexander Vine. Vine, a troubled youth reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield, teeters between his day job as a doorman and his explicitly related night prowls. A columnist for The New York Press, Ames frequently performs as a storyteller in theaters and nightclubs. This first novel was published in 1989 and recently has been reissued in paperback.
-Maria LoBiondo
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