(3 of 4)
THERE ARE VIRTUALLY NO BOOKS MENTIONED IN TERRORIST OTHER THAN THE KORAN. IT'S ALMOST A BOOK-FREE WORLD. I think America is an increasingly book-free country. In the world of my boyhood, there were books everywhere. Your piano teacher had books, and there were lending libraries everywhere--your department store had a lending library. Books are still bought, and you see them being read in airplanes, but it's a last resort, isn't it? And the category of "literary fiction" has sprung up recently to torment people like me who just set out to write books, and if anybody wanted to read them, terrific, the more the merrier. But now, no, I'm a genre writer of a sort. I write literary fiction, which is like spy fiction or chick lit. I was hoping to talk to America, like Walt Whitman, you know? Address it and describe it to itself.
ONE OF THE CHALLENGES OF THIS BOOK MUST HAVE BEEN RENDERING THE WAY YOUNG PEOPLE TALK. ALWAYS RISKY FOR AN OLDER WRITER. You don't want to make it feel like you ran out and bought the latest version of the teen slang compendium. I don't know, maybe I did a laughably feeble job. I just tried to hear it, hear it as I imagined it. I figure this is my little world and not anybody else's.
Present teen attitudes are in a way part of what the book is about, isn't it? These things are possible not just because of suicide bombers in Iraq but because of high school students in Colorado or New Jersey or anywhere else who are actually planning massacres followed by their own deaths. This is so beyond what was present in my high school, I think. This kind of friendliness toward death, this feeling that it's not such a big deal to kill or die, is after my generation. And you begin to say, Why? There are so many people in the world that I think the notion that you are dispensable begins to catch everywhere. And that also, in an economic situation that seems like a dead end to everybody, like this one, I think it's easier to be willing to die.
WHEN THE NEW YORK TIMES POLLED CRITICS LAST MONTH ABOUT THE GREATEST WORK OF FICTION IN THE PAST 25 YEARS, YOUR RABBIT NOVELS WERE MENTIONED. I didn't see that.
I HATE TO BE THE ONE TO TELL YOU THAT YOU WEREN'T NO. 1. Listen, anything ...
I THINK RABBIT TIED FOR THIRD WITH BLOOD MERIDIAN. Cormac McCarthy.
YOU AND CORMAC MCCARTHY. Ahhh, together again. I've never been able to read much of him, between us. No doubt the failing is mine. But better to be third than not at all.
DO YOU EVER THINK ABOUT RETIRING? I've reached an age when everybody else is retired, of my peers, more or less. As a writer you're self-employed. There's nobody to tell you to pack it in. It might be a mercy.
HOW WOULD YOU GO ABOUT RETIRING? I GUESS YOU'D JUST QUIETLY FALL SILENT. You'd fall silent, [submissions] would start to come back, there would be embarrassed conferences with your editors, and eventually you would see that, in fact, you were senile. They're very slow to realize that, I think, people are. But for now I'll push on a little longer.