With every book I try to do something different," says Siri Hustvedt, seated in the parlor of the Park Slope brownstone she shares with her husband, fellow novelist Paul Auster, and their 15-year-old daughter, Sophie. What I Loved (Fiction Forecasts, Dec. 16, 2002), to be published by Holt this month, does indeed mark a significant departure from her two previous novels, which both took as their protagonists young women who had at least a few traits in common with their author. Iris Vegan, narrator of The Blindfold (1992), was, like Hustvedt, a graduate student at Columbia, and although her surreal, often scary adventures were not literally autobiographical ("I didn't do all that stuff!" the author exclaims), the book, she says, "was to some degree about the experience of first being in New York." The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), set in Hustvedt's native Minnesota, employed third-person narration to chronicle an intense three months in the life of teenaged Lily, who stood at the threshold of adulthood without quite knowing what she wanted from it.
"The one thing I knew after I finished my first two books was that next time around I was going to be a man," says Hustvedt. "I was nervous about it, because you want to feel the whole being of the guy, you want to have the anatomy in the words. But that wasn't so hard, probably because women hear men speaking our whole lives. Writing as a man wasn't as hard as getting this particular man's voice right and striking the right tone for the book. It took six years; I rewrote it four times completely from scratch, starting on a blank page."
It's not just that the narrator of What I Loved, art historian Leo Hertzberg, is a man; he's also an elderly man looking back at events that occurred over the course of 25 years, examining the evolution of his relationships with artist Bill Wechsler; with Bill's two wives, neurotic poet Lucille Alcott and vibrant cultural historian Violet Blom; and with his own wife, English professor Erica Stein. All of them must also deal with the tragic fates of two boys: Bill and Lucille's son Mark, wounded in devastating but mysterious ways by his parents' divorce, and Leo and Erica's son Matthew, whose untimely death breaks up his parents' marriage. Set primarily in Manhattan from 1975 to 2000, the novel paints an astute portrait of New York's volatile art scene and its denizens while sensitively considering the nature of friendship and of marital and parental love.
"Because What I Loved had so much stuff in it, I struggled for a long time to make it move," the author comments. "The last draft finally had some kind of narrative engine. I'm not sure that I'm a natural storyteller, actually, but I feel it's important for a book to have momentum. My husband and I once met Mickey Spillane in Sweden, and he said the most beautiful thing: 'Nobody reads a book to get to the middle!' " Hustvedt laughs delightedly, as she does often in conversation. "Paul and I always say that to each other now—it's a great point! I think all of us have read books that just run out of gas. They might be beautifully written, but there's this static quality. You need to have some compulsion to get to the end."
All three of her books compel the reader toward decidedly grim climaxes, none more unsettling than the spooky scene in What I Loved set in a Nashville hotel, where Leo is menaced by Mark's dark mentor, psychopathic artist Teddy Giles. "I stayed in that hotel on a book tour," Hustvedt recalls with a grimace. "In fact, while Leo was chasing Mark across the country, I used all my book tour spots. But this particular hotel has an environment of crass commercialism taken to a degree that is almost unimaginable. Leo, this poor silly wandering Jew born in Berlin in 1930, is really a foreigner there. And then he encounters this terrible sadism: the worst thing is not being slammed against the wall, but having Giles's fingers in his hair."
Leo's confrontation with Giles caps the novel's increasingly sad second half, in which the adults discover that Mark's agreeable facade conceals a secret life of theft, drug taking, cross-dressing and violence. The creepy symbiosis between Mark's personal neuroses and the morally bankrupt corner of the art world that nurtures them taps into a metaphor that has informed Hustvedt's fiction since her first novel. Iris's fleeting perception of "the infection among us" in The Blindfold becomes a dominant image in What I Loved: "the sickness that moves in the air," the complex interaction between individual personality and the wider culture that shapes our behavior and beliefs. "We think of ourselves as enclosed bodies," Hustvedt says, "and we are, but we are also open: the outside world is in us, and at the same time we're in the world. All the ideas and the reading and pictures we look at and what people say to us is all in us; we're permeable. I've always been fascinated by what happens between people. This area"—she gestures to the space between her and her interviewer—"is almost like a character in itself. That exchange, how we infect each other, is central to what I always want to explore."
"Where all this stuff comes from, God only knows," Hustvedt remarks. She certainly doesn't look or act like someone drawn to morbid moments or images of illness. Just about to turn 48, dressed in Brooklyn mom clothes (jeans, a black sweater and clogs), her blonde hair pulled off her face, the writer slouches casually in an armchair, speaking about her work with articulate intelligence and contemplating life's ups and downs with a robust sense of humor.
Yet, she admits, "There's some fascination with pretty dark, horrible things, no question about it. I think some of it is just trying to understand a kind of sadism that exists in the world, and not push it away, but just go there. What I Loved is already out in Germany, England and France—I have a few loyal publishers, and they all get the manuscript at the same time—and in Germany someone wrote a big article talking about its relation to Ibsen's Ghosts. I can honestly say that this never occurred to me, although my father is an Ibsen scholar. I do think there is a Protestant, Scandinavian, rather stoical awareness of the terrible suffering and strangeness and misery that goes on in life, and I know that it's a part of me."
Herself of Scandinavian descent (her first published prose book was a translation of a Norwegian biography of Dostoyevski), Hustvedt grew up in Northfield, Minn. "As a child I drew really fanatically. My parents thought I would become a painter. Then in high school I wrote poems constantly, and in college [St. Olaf, in her hometown] I wrote some very short stories, maybe a page long. I remember starting a novel and writing two pages, and I just didn't have a clue as to how to go about it. I'm a slow bloomer; I'm always impressed with these very young people who write novels, even if they're bad. They just go ahead and do it, even if the results are not fabulous. I had to grope my way forward."
You might think that being married to a very well-known novelist would make that groping all the more intimidating, but a few minutes in Hustvedt's quietly self-assured company puts that notion quickly to rest. Auster had not yet made his reputation with the City of Glass trilogy when they married in 1982, and in any case, she declares, "The inside story is a little more sorrowful. Paul was writing The Invention of Solitude [a memoir] when we met; I read the first half and thought, 'This guy is totally amazing!' Then he wrote City of Glass, which we both thought was a great book, an extraordinary book that broke ground. But it was rejected by 17 New York publishers; that was tough. Now it's translated into some 30 languages and sold all over the world, but you don't forget that early struggle."
"Writers are always suffering, even when they're really famous," she says with a wry grin. "I remember once seeing John Updike on television. The interviewer was saying, 'It's such an honor to have you here, blah blah, you're such a beloved American writer,' and Updike said, 'Not by everyone.' I thought, 'This guy is replaying this tape in his head of every bad review he's ever had for 40 years!' You have to be amused by it, but people are tender. There's always something to feel bad about." For herself, she says with another grin, "I suffer in advance. I've always been able to take criticism and rejection better than I expected, because what I've imagined is always worse than the reality."
In fact, her first novel, The Blindfold, was published by a good-sized New York house to good reviews, although Poseidon Press foundered before her second was ready. "I'm slow," Hustvedt sighs. "By the time I finish a book, the whole publishing scene has changed! But Michael Naumann, who had published me in Germany, was at Holt, so I went there for The Enchantment of Lily Dahl." She remained for a collection of essays, Yonder, published in 1998. "I like writing nonfiction. It uses a different part of yourself, a more analytic side, and you're looking more outward than inward. And when I sit down to write about art or a book, I'm just writing as myself, which I like."
In a way she was writing as herself in The Blindfold, whose heroine bears Hustvedt's mother's maiden name and her own first name spelled in reverse. "Iris really is me backwards, some kind of a reflected image. In that way it's a classic first novel. I was never as fragile as Iris, but I took that fragile, fragmented part of myself and pushed it rather far to make the story, which for me is on some level emotionally true. I think sometimes fiction gives you a kind of freedom to journey to places that are true; writing a true story, a memoir, doesn't give you the same liberty. Writing for me is a way to get down to some kind of truth, and when you hit it, you know it's right even if you don't quite know why. I never have a master plan, so things just happen."
Still daunted by the length a novel required, she wrote The Blindfold "in four self-contained sections that related to each other, like a quartet. That's what I was capable of doing at the time, and even that was hard—it took me a year to write each piece. Then I set up Lily Dahl as a continuous narrative in the third person; it was what I wanted to do, but it took me a long time. My ambition increases with each book."
The title of her next novel certainly suggests big ambitions. "It's called The Sorrows of an American. It was inspired by a memoir my father wrote for his family, which tells about the vanished immigrant world of the Midwest, but there are all kinds of other things in it, too, and I'm hearing all these different characters. Right now it's a big mess, but I'll figure it out... I think." And once again, Siri Hustvedt laughs.
