The fictional town of Falls, N.C., continues to supply Allan Gurganus with plenty of grist for his writing mill. This time, it’s a collection of novellas, Local Souls (Liveright, Sept.), which focuses on three different people in the small village: “Fear Not” features a banker’s daughter looking for the child she gave up for adoption; “Saints Have Mothers” examines how a mother manages the disappearance of her talented daughter; and “Decoy” looks at the impact of a disastrous flood on an erotic friendship between two married men. Gurganus explains why he didn’t put them all into one large novel: “I felt that each of their lives deserved a serious, full-stage press. I wanted to give their dramas a kind of separate attention. There’s something extremely satisfying in eliminating the secondary plot and focusing on a single character’s dilemma from beginning to end. It’s like pure protein and no carbohydrates—like eating tuna fish out of a can over the sink. I like that.”
Gurganus believes he has found the right formula in today’s fast-paced digital world, where attention spans have shortened and where there are endless distractions for today’s readers. “I think in terms of 80 to 100 pages. I love that length and I’m really in love with the novella. Writers have to respond to the currency of the culture. It’s the form that’s most perfect for the way we live now.”
Reminded that his first (and bestselling) novel, The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, was such a large tome (718 pages), he says, “She had 99 years and the previous century to tell, and she was trying to tell not only her story and her late husband’s story, but the story of her nine children and of her friend, the freed slave, Castalia, so it was joyful to have a voice as expansive as hers.”
He’s annoyed over remarks that it’s been 11 years since he last published. “People say, ‘Why haven’t you been writing?’ My god! I write every day. It’s just the difference between writing and publishing. I think of books not just as pickles in a jar coming down the assembly line or as amusements that I crank out, but as notes from experience. There’s a perspective that goes with having lived another decade, and I hope that’s reflected in the books. I want them to be very funny and very honest at the same time.”
This is Gurganus’s first time at BEA. He will be signing galleys of his book today, at the Liveright booth (1920), at 11 a.m.
