Lily Tuck's heroines are strangers in strange lands. The spoiled suburban housewife in The Woman Who Walked on Water; the young bride adrift in PEN/Faulkner nominee Siam; the vacationers, honeymooners and exiles in the short story collection Limbo; the adventurous Irishwoman in Tuck's new novel, The News from Paraguay (click here to read the review), are all striving to find a place for themselves in foreign countries both alluring and dangerous. And no wonder: the author herself was on her third continent and third language before she turned 10. Born in Paris in 1938 to German parents who had fled the Nazis, Tuck lived in Peru and Uruguay with her mother during the Second World War while her father was in the French Foreign Legion, then returned briefly to France until her parents divorced and she found herself in Manhattan attending fourth grade at the Nightingale-Bamford School.
"I didn't speak any English," she recalls, "and I don't think I opened my mouth for a year, because I didn't want to be the foreigner. Nobody paid any attention to me. I just sat in the corner, and eventually, when I felt I could speak without an accent, I spoke. I had gone to school in Lima and Montevideo and Paris, but I was always moving and never really had any friends." By the time she got to New York, she says, "I was used to being the outsider and being lonely. It bothered me to a certain extent, but it was what I expected. That's probably the reason I'm a writer."
After further wanderings as a young wife in the 1960s and a divorcée in the '70s, Tuck settled down with her second husband in Manhattan. Widowed a year and a half ago, she lives on the Upper East Side in a spacious, airy apartment adorned with flowers and photographs of her children (two stepsons and a stepdaughter in addition to her three sons) and grandchildren. Slim and elegant, with blunt-cut gray hair brushing her chin above a cream-colored V-neck sweater and black slacks, she sometimes speaks so quietly she can hardly be heard, but her description of herself as "shy and withdrawn and inarticulate" isn't really accurate; she simply chooses her words as carefully in conversation as she does in her books.
Of The News from Paraguay, published this month by HarperCollins, she remarks, it has its origins in one of her earliest pieces of fiction. "When I began writing seriously about 25 years ago, I wrote a short story about Ella Lynch and Franco Solano Lopez [the novel's protagonists and real 19th-century persons]. I couldn't get it published, and a friend of mine said—this is my favorite rejection story— 'Send it to Braniff Airlines magazine; I know somebody there and I'm sure they'll take it because they fly to South America.' So I was very excited to send it to them, but the story came back with a note that said, 'I'm sorry, we only do stories on Braniff's destination cities'—and Asunción [Paraguay's capital] was not one of them! So that was the end of that," she says with a sardonic smile.
There's scant humor, though much dark poetry, in the novel that finally emerged from that rejected story. We meet Ella riding through the Bois de Boulogne in 1854: "at nineteen, divorced and living with a handsome but impecunious Russian count... [she] needed to reinvent herself." Her opportunity comes from Franco, a wealthy Paraguayan who woos Ella by buying her the beautiful gray mare she loves and persuades her to come home with him. "If I am not happy there I can always come back to Paris," she blithely writes in the diary whose (fictional) entries Tuck skillfully weaves into the third-person narration. But by the time Ella returns to France at the novel's end, she has seen her eldest son killed and buried her lover's corpse with her bare hands. The News from Paraguay captures the physical beauty of an exotic land in Tuck's characteristically exact, evocative prose, but it also limns horrifying cruelty and a bloody, pointless war that sweeps the characters to catastrophe.
It will come as no surprise to readers of Tuck's books, rich in evocative details and chary of generalization, that the author shies away from pronouncements about what drew her to such a grim tale. She prefers to focus on the technical challenge of taking real-life material—Ella, Franco, and several of the novel's other characters are historical figures; an actual war decimated Paraguay in the second half of the 1860s—and making it work in a novel. "Every book has its own set of problems, and the biggest challenge in Paraguay was to get in all these facts in an acceptable way." A horrifying image of a newspaper reprinting Franco's bombastic justification of the war being used to cover a shriveled corpse, she explains, was simply "another way of getting information out there without seeming to. I think that's what I strive for as a writer: God is in the details, and I try to nail down whatever it is in as few words as possible."
She also tries to create empathy for characters who could be dismissed as monsters. "I didn't want them to be likable, but I wanted them to surprise the reader with touching aspects. Nobody's all good or bad; I wanted them to be the way all human beings are. One passage that I like is with Ella's little boy, Pancho, who collects dead people's ears, but then suddenly he's eating cake and his mouth is full and he says, 'I want to go to Paris. Is it beautiful?' I think that makes you like him for a minute, or at least be touched by him. It's something I learned with my writing teacher, Gordon Lish, to always try and do the slightly unexpected."
Tuck credits Lish with helping an unpublished, unfocused novelist gain discipline and technique. She had taken creative writing courses as an undergraduate at Radcliffe, "but I wasn't particularly encouraged." Studies at the Sorbonne for a master's degree in American literature after her divorce were more helpful: "The French were big into all sorts of literary theories, so we read Robert Coover and Richard Brautigan and Frederick Barthelme, all these people I had never heard of. It opened me up a lot." But when she tried to write a novel loosely based on the disappearance of an American businessman she had known in Thailand, "I spent seven years on it and then couldn't get it published, which upset me enormously."
By that time she was remarried and living in New York. "A friend of mine had studied with Gordon, and I thought, 'Why not?' He was giving these very intense private classes, six hours once a week in his brownstone. He was very severe and strict, but I learned an enormous amount from him about the nuts and bolts of writing, and I will always be grateful. What he taught me, which probably isn't what you think of in terms of Gordon, is to be incredibly grammatical, to spell everything properly, to be logical. That was one of his big things, that every sentence has to follow the next sentence. This is one of the reasons I don't revise very much, because the sentence has to be as perfect as I can get it, and that leads me to the next sentence, so I don't write these long, big drafts where everything is this hodgepodge and then I fix it later. It has to be pretty okay to start with, because otherwise I don't know where to go next."
She became a published novelist in 1991, when Lish ushered Interviewing Matisse into print at Knopf. (When she introduced herself as "one of your authors" to publisher Sonny Mehta at a social occasion, she recounts with a laugh, he observed coolly, "Oh, you must be one of Gordon's loopy writers.") Consisting entirely of a dialogue between two women discussing the bizarre death of a mutual friend, Interviewing Matisse "is probably my most experimental book," Tuck says, "and in a funny way, it's my favorite book. I don't think it works particularly, and I don't think the writing is very good, and I wish I could do it over, but I think it's my bravest book."
Lish turned down The Woman Who Walked on Water, which received a lot more rejections before Cindy Spiegel at Riverhead Books took on Tuck's fascinating novel about Adele, who abandons her comfortable existence to follow the teachings of an Indian guru. "My best, best friend is somebody who, like Adele, had led a very conventional life, had children, and then suddenly off she went. I tried not to make it too much like her, because we're still very close and I didn't want to offend her. I think it bothered people who read it, and it bothers me, too, that I didn't have a clear idea of what was going on in Adele's head, as I don't in my friend's head even though I speak to her almost every day. I felt that I never really got to the bottom of anything in that book. But I don't think anything can be explained; life is a mystery, and there aren't any answers."
That sense of mystery resonates throughout Siam, the novel that gained Tuck a wider audience with its PEN/Faulkner nomination and a sheaf of favorable reviews. Without a didactic word, Siam enfolds America's nightmarish Southeast Asian misadventure within the personal drama of Claire, who, overwhelmed both by her new husband and the enticing, menacing country to which he's taken her, becomes obsessed with Jim Thompson, who really did vanish from the Malaysian highlands in the mid-'60s. It, too, endured a disheartening series of turndowns before Tuck's friend Francine Prose selected the manuscript for the Sewanee Prize, which led to its 1999 publication by Overlook Press. Ruefully noting her lack of a sustained publishing relationship, the author hopes she's finally found a home with "wonderful" Terry Karten, who edited both Limbo and The News from Paraguay.
In Siam, Tuck finally mastered the material she had struggled with for seven years in the unpublished novel that drove her to Lish's writing class. "I went to Thailand with my first husband, I knew Jim Thompson, and that story always haunted me. The first version was much more experimental; you didn't know what was real and what wasn't." That version took less note of the historical winds that blow so powerfully through Siam, and she was certainly unaware of them when she lived there, the author says. "We were leading this gloriously carefree kind of hippie life, we were very ignorant, had no idea of the [military] buildup going on." With maturity, she can see not only the hidden political realities that led people to assume her husband was with the CIA ("actually, he was just this very rich man trying to do business in Thailand") but also the fact that "my life has been so dictated by political events. I didn't starve to death, I wasn't tortured, I was well taken care of, but there was always this undercurrent of my mother and father having lost everything. I feel very anchored in one sense with my family, but in another I feel that my life is such an accident, I could have ended up in a million different places: France, Germany, South America."
Or Italy, where Tuck spent summers with her father in the 1950s, and which will provide the backdrop for her next book if she can resolve some conceptual questions. "I think I'd like to write an imagined biography of an Italian writer," she says, asking that the name of the real-life author remain off the record. "I don't know what genre that will fall into. It will have to do with Italian fascism, but as background to what's going on in the story. I'd like to incorporate her work and imagine her life. I'm doing a lot of reading, but I haven't figured it out yet."
