Jane Smiley is one of the leading novelists of our day. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction back in 1992 for A Thousand Acres, a harrowing retelling of the King Lear story from the standpoint of the sisters, who have to contend with a father who raped them in their teens and bullied them all their lives. She’s written ten other novels, including Moo and her most recent, Ten Days in the Hills, which takes place in Hollywood, starting with the day George Bush launched the Iraq War. In this novel, Smiley’s politics ring clear, as her protagonist, Elena, assails the Iraq War. When her lover says, “I want to fuck,” she says, “Stop the war.”
Smiley, who also has written a biography of Charles Dickens, champions fiction in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, and then she takes a look at 100 of them.
For the last couple of years, Smiley has written a blog for Huffington Post, where she has cut loose with attacks against the Bush Administration, guns, religion, and Democratic cowardice. She took a break from the blog in May, and has returned to it a couple of times since.
Smiley is also an avid horsewoman. She owns, rides, and trains them, and she writes about them, too, in Horse Heaven.
I flew out to California to interview Smiley on August 14. On a cloudless morning in Carmel Valley, I pulled up to her place near Story Road, up a steep hill. We were going to talk in her home, but she was having a new roof put on, so we went into town and sat in a coffee shop for two and a half hours.
Standing at six-feet-two, and wearing a straw hat, Smiley was instantly recognizable by many people in the shop—but not for being a novelist. “Are you Jane?” one woman asked. After getting an affirmative response, she continued: “How are your horses?”
Another woman exclaimed how fun the riding lessons were that they had taken the day before. And one man asked her right away about the possibility of Al Gore getting into the Presidential race.
Smiley’s fourteen-year-old son came by, and I offered him a copy of The Progressive. “What kind of magazine is it?” he asked. When I told him it was about politics, he dashed away. Her partner, Jack, also stopped by a couple of times during our expansive conversation.
For all her fame, she seemed eager to talk about politics and novels, and her demeanor was jovial and down to earth.
Question: How did you get started writing for Huffington Post?
Jane Smiley: I had written a piece right around the time of Katrina. I sent it to the L.A. Times, and they weren’t interested, so I put it away. But it so happened my partner and I were going on the Nation cruise as paid customers, and Arianna was on the cruise. And it also so happened that I was seated at her table. Arianna was a little late. So I made sure her seat was next to mine. Arianna is an incredibly well-mannered person, and when she sat down, she said, “Who are you? What’s your name? What do you do?” I told her my name. I told her I was a novelist. She said, “Oh, what have you written?” She had no idea who I was. But she instantly became attentive when I told her I’d won the Pulitzer Prize, and she asked me if I’d ever considered writing a blog. I said, “Actually, Arianna, I have a piece. I’d love to put it on your blog.” And so I sent her the piece and started writing for her. This year, I kept writing until the end of May, but then I had to go back to being a full-time novelist.
Q: Was writing the blog distracting?
Smiley: I can’t say it was distracting, but it was time-consuming. She put me on one of the weekly slots—Tuesday, I think it was. Generating something once a week was a little taxing for me. Rather than simply riding the wave of outrage, I had to actually cast about for something to write about. So, I couldn’t be a reliable pundit.
Q: In one of your Huffington Post columns, you wrote that Bush is not only the worst President, but the worst possible President. Why?
Smiley: At that particular point in history in 2001, what we needed was a person with wide-ranging interests and knowledge, who could have had a strategy and a vision for how to move the country and the world through a dangerous period. Instead, we had an ignoramus, whose own psychology was very iffy. Bush was a person with a lot of inchoate ideas. What Michael Gerson and his other speechwriters did was they took his feelings and gave them eloquent expression. And as he said the words, he told himself, “Oh yeah, that’s how I feel, that’s what I think.” Bush’s speechwriters enabled him to modify his thought system to be much more full of conviction than he was when he started. And Bush never felt comfortable with the way his dad thought or did things. Cheney divined that, and he moved into the psychological spot of the authority figure, and then he manipulated Bush to be like him rather than Bush’s dad.
Q: You write that we should “investigate, impeach, indict, and imprison” Bush.
Smiley: Yes, I think so. Start with the people around him. Compile a dossier of lawbreaking. And you tighten the noose.
Q: What do you say to people who claim, “There’s not enough time. It’s a diversion.” Smiley: You still got to do it. I don’t care if it’s a diversion. If they get away with it, in the small or in the large, then they’ll be encouraged by that, and they will move the indicator toward lawlessness as a general feature.
Q: You have a name for this: the “try-and-stop-me” conservatism.
Smiley: Yeah. We first saw it in the election controversy in 2000. They clearly intended to win by intimidation. Greg Palast has shown that they intended to steal the Florida vote. Even the rightwing Supreme Court justices were emboldened to step out of their costumes as justices and to don their costumes as partisans. That’s a bold move, even for Scalia and Thomas. That’s when I said, uh-oh. If you have an Administration that openly disdains the rule of law, they’re disdaining it because they’ve committed crimes. And now they’re on a spiral.
Q: Where does this spiral go?
Smiley: The biggest fear of the anonymous posters on Huffington Post is that they’ll suspend the elections and declare martial law. That’s everybody’s biggest fear. Will they actually do that? I don’t know.
Q: In one of your postings, you wrote: “The Right is a constant and the Left is intermittent.” What do you mean by that?
Smiley: The Left in America is constrained by the Constitution, and the left edge of the Constitution isn’t very far left. The Right, however, has a lot of tradition on its side: the tradition of vigilantism, the tradition of arms-bearing, the tradition of racism, the tradition of don’t tread on me, the tradition of ruthless exploitation of the natural world. These are standard American ways. Only as people become more sophisticated in their thinking and more educated do they realize that taking what others have just because you can is actually inhumane and immoral and unethical. Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community, but we don’t really want to be in the Communist Party, either. We don’t mind a little income redistribution through progressive taxation. But do we really want to live on the collective farm? I don’t think so! I spent part of my college years in a Marxist commune. I was not a Marxist. I wasn’t even pretending to be one. I was a Marxist-in-law. My boyfriend was in the Harvard-Yale SDS, which was allied with the Progressive Labor Party. I was always asking inappropriate questions. When one guy got a low draft number and we were talking about whether he was going to do his work in the army, I was the only person who said, “Well, what does he want to do?” The whole idea that his desire would even be a material consideration was discounted. So I was not in sympathy with them. And I’m a natural novelist. I’m interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don’t want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.
Q: You write in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel that all novels are liberal, and all novels are political. How is that?
Smiley: There are five things that societies do: They reproduce; they produce food; they organize themselves in terms of law; they organize themselves in terms of belief; and they make art. Four of them are about conformity, and in these, everything would go more smoothly if people just would shut up and do what they’re told. But in art it doesn’t work that way. Art doesn’t exist if you just do what you’re told. It only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom. So in every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects. Every novel deals with social problems. It can’t help it because the protagonist must come in conflict with his group. So the author has to offer an analysis of how the group and the protagonist fit. Otherwise, the reader will just say, “This makes no sense,” and will put it away.
Q: You seem to have a bias against novels like Ulysses that are so highly constructed that they seem to be geared to an aristocratic reading audience.
Smiley: I don’t have a bias against them, per se. They form a subgroup, though. The thing that those novelists are always saying about themselves is, “This is true art. And all those others are just commerce.” So, it’s like they’re saying to themselves, “Well, I didn’t get to be a bestseller, so I get to be art.” That was Henry James’s point of view. Inevitably, that excludes women.
Q: How so?
Smiley: Because the actual dynamics of relationships interest them. Let’s take George Eliot as our paradigm of a woman writer. She’s clearly interested in the ins and outs of relationships. She wants to investigate them, and she wants them to come to a resolution. And because she’s really smart, she can investigate them in a really intelligent way, and she can use a lot of big words, so the men will let her into the club. But she’s not playing with the form the way James and other male novelists came to do. Well, is the only criterion for novelistic greatness that you play with the form? Why should it be? It became a major criterion in the late twentieth century, but times change. Things pass. In the old days, there was a defined, status-giving elite: intellectuals in New York City. But publishing has burst out of that in almost every way. The rise of women’s book groups means that books are selling whether someone at The New York Review of Books likes them or not.
Q: What’s behind the rise of women’s book groups?
Smiley: Women love to read books. And they just keep reading books. Last time I was on a Nation cruise, one of the women I met was a Jungian psychotherapist from L.A. I asked, just out of curiosity, “What’s the demographic of your clientele?” She said: “Women of all kinds, and Jewish men.” And that’s the demographic of novel readers because those are the people who are introspective, with a few Midwestern men thrown in, reluctantly. I think literature is really interesting right now. The novel is by nature anarchic, so the novel fits the world we live in. And here’s the main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It’s not possessed by the writer; it’s possessed by the reader.
Q: There’s a lot of sex in Ten Days in the Hills. How hard is it to write about sex?
Smiley: I love to write about sex. You just have to make it idiosyncratic. You have to have a strong comprehension of your characters, and write it from their point of view. It’s really fun. It’s not erotic. That was the greatest thing for me about writing that book. The erotic scenes were not erotic. When you’re writing erotica or pornography, the whole point is to have them throw the book aside and masturbate. But I didn’t want that. I wanted the guy to think, “Oh, I could do that, but I’d rather read on past the climax just to see what was happening in the real climax, which is the literary climax rather than the sexual climax.” So for me, that was tremendously fun. It was a great game.
Q: What’s with your fascination with horses?
Smiley: When my son was ten months old, I went back to horses; I went back to being a total neophyte. Horses constantly reduce your ego. Either you feel great and the horse isn’t responding, or the horse is doing great and you’re doing great with him but he dies. You cannot be an egomaniac on the horse. If you lose your temper and start beating him, either you will destroy him, or he will destroy you. As soon as you start riding horses seriously, you’re being disciplined on a daily basis about how ignorant you are and what there is left for you to learn. But it’s just so much fun you can’t even believe how much fun it is. And the great thing is that the fun gets greater as you get better. And there’s no glass ceiling.
Q: Do you race horses, too?
Smiley: I don’t race horses now. They’re all too old or too young. But I hope to race one again.
Q: Is that a thrill?
Smiley: It’s really much more intimidating than anything having to do with literature. When I had horses at the racetrack, I would wake up in terror in a way that I would never wake up while working on a novel. For outtakes of this interview click here.