Aaron Hamburger is the author of the story collection The View from Stalin’s Head, winner of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the novel Faith for Beginners. Maxine Swann is the author of the novels Serious Girls and the forthcoming Flower Children and has won an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize. This fall, the two of them were visiting writers at Barnard College. Recently they got together to discuss their latest books, Hamburger’s Faith for Beginners, just released in paperback, and Swann’s new novel Flower Children, which comes out in May.

AH: How did Flower Children come into being? Did it begin with a few stories, and then you wrote other stories to fill in gaps, or did you conceive the book from the beginning as pieces of a longer format?

MS: I knew I wanted to write a book about the lives of the children of the sixties and seventies flower children, a generation that I belong to and that is just now coming into its own. What were the results of this radical social experiment? I wrote the first story, with the idea that it would be both a story and the opening to the book. Then, I think because of the nature of the first story, I had a tricky time going from there. I tried things, waited. Then finally found a way, or rather ways, to tell the rest.

AH: With my novel, I fell into the structure by accident. It was actually supposed to be two paired novellas, one about Tel Aviv, the other about Jerusalem, linked by the story of a gay yeshiva kid in Jerusalem who discovers his sexuality and runs off to Tel Aviv. But when I got to Israel to research that, I found that it wasn't a story I was interested in telling. Then I was visiting with a friend who was in Israel on a "Mission," and I got interested in the experiences of these spiritual tourists, who for the price of their ticket were expecting a spiritual experience in addition to all the other expectations tourists have. I was interested in the strain that causes, and the feelings of inadequacy that must arise if you don't feel spiritual on demand. So off I went in that direction.

MS: And you kept your gay yeshiva kid who wants to run off to Tel Aviv as the secondary character, Noam.

AH: How do you feel about the novel versus the short story? It's a question I get asked a lot because I've done both at this point, and I have to say that I find novel-writing takes longer to complete but the process feels easier and more natural. The short story for me is like having to do a perfect ballet move in a cramped closet.

MS: Yeah, the short story can feel cramped. But it's also a bit like doing something on the side of the dance floor, where no one may be looking. You can try a new, weird move and, if it's not working, walk away. There's also something I know I enjoy about polishing and polishing and polishing. I think it calms me down. This is possible with a story. Whereas with the unwieldiness of a novel, I can feel both exhilarated and distraught. On the other hand, it occurs to me now that whenever I'm writing a story, I'm nearly always already putting it in a larger context of a book, thinking how it'll reflect off the other pieces. Now, for instance, along with my next novel, which is set in Argentina, I'm writing a collection of love stories. There are different characters in each of them, but a similar sort of air, as if a window has been left open somewhere. I think there must be something that really appeals to me about having separate, polished pieces with oblique connections. Maybe my interior universe is ordered in that way.

AH: There are a lot of startling narrative gaps in your book, spaces between the chapters in which time hurtles forward, for example. Did you have a strategy behind some of them, or did it emerge and you let it happen?

MS: I let the gaps appear or rather I didn't try to fill them in. The book is based on autobiographical material, though transformed, of course. I think when we think back on our lives, it's like that. There are whole stretches in the shadows, for years nothing seems to happen, then a figure or event emerges.

AH: Since you mention the book is autobiographical, I’m curious if you could reflect on how you perceive the way you were raised. How does it strike you as an adult to have been brought up with so much "freedom"?

MS: My novel is autobiographical to a degree. Whenever narrative necessity dictates, I toss biography aside without a thought. And, yes, the freedom question interests me. I hope that the novel offers a more complex answer on my thoughts on the matter than I could give here. I think too much freedom is dizzying and frightening, for children and adults alike. We're all always looking for parameters and rules, for ourselves and others, even if we then want to go ahead and cross them. This is one of the ways we form who we are. On the other hand, the thrill of dizziness is not to be overlooked. I actually find that now that I'm older and less frightened of things, I'm much more able to appreciate and play with all the dizzying possibilities my upbringing presented.

AH: Can you talk about the way you used a third person plural perspective, "they" instead of "she," talking about all the children growing up in this hippie household as a unit?

MS: I found that the use of the third person "they,” which I discovered in the opening chapter, and which allowed me to tell the story in the way that felt most true, was not sustainable throughout the whole book. While it felt like a perfectly elegant (in the mathematical sense) solution in chapter 1, in other chapters it felt forced. I abandoned it and found other strategies. Some chapters are narrated from the "I,” others from the third person singular. I was delighted, however, when the third person plural voice reemerged at the end, in the final chapter, where once again it presented itself as the obvious, and maybe even the only, way to convey what I wanted to convey.

AH: My favorite character in Flower Children was the father. His fecklessness had a certain nobility to it. He stuck to his ideals no matter how wrong-headed they may have seemed to others (including the reader), no matter what mess they led him into. I'm curious if you see him as noble, sympathetic, or in a more negative light?

MS: Yeah, the father's voice and character just seemed to fill the book. I think he is appealing and even as, later, he veers more and more out of control. I think I see him as interesting, playful and fun, a bit on edge, if not occasionally dangerous, but then veering back again, struggling, touching. As you can see, I find it pretty much impossible to pass judgment on him. But I don't think that's what you're asking for either.

In your book, I was really struck by the way you capture the delight and absurdity of cross-cultural communication and miscommunication. The notes written by the deaf Palestinian character, George, whose English is also tentative, were wonderful examples of this. I was reminded of a moment in Pakistan, where I lived for a year, when I asked our translator about the transvestite in town. He said that he was a hermaphrodite, what we call in the West a hippy. It seems that although, of course, sometimes in these situations things are wildly misunderstood, others are expressed so unusually, they end up being meaningful in a new way.

AH: One interesting thing about this cultural moment is that English is being spoken all over the globe by people who are not native speakers of English and they are coming up with interesting and unusual new ways of using the language that can be refreshing and often very funny. We see this reflected in literary novels but also popular entertainment like Borat, and I think there will be more of this to come.

MS: Having lived almost my entire adult life abroad, I'm so used to people speaking English inventively that sometimes I even feel a bit bored by my own and other natives' grammatically correct use of it.

AH: In your book, I was also impressed by the control of your narrative voice, how it whispered some of the most startlingly precise or emotionally evocative details in the reader’s ear, without leaping for unwarranted drama. You also manage to break a lot of creative writing rules with your sentences. For example, you'll have strings of sentences with the same structure right in a row, subject-verb-object without seeming repetitive, or you use exclamation points without seeming to be laughing at your own joke as F. Scott Fitzgerald said. I'm wondering how you developed your prose style. Is it something that happens as you revise? Do you think about sound and rhythm primarily? Is it more intuitive?

MS: In an essay on Flaubert's style, Proust wrote that it's only in Sentimental Education that Flaubert becomes Flaubert, that is, where every sentence is dipped in the dye of his style. Then he points out the sentences in Madame Bovary that are "not yet Flaubert.”

I think style is something you work toward, getting closer and closer the more you write. It really is the transcription of an interior voice, yours, that is like no one else's. Ideally, it should eventually be as recognizable as your voice is to others when you say Hello on the phone. But this is a long process. And intuitive, yes. And comes through practice.

I thought of Forster, especially A Passage to India, when reading your novel. Was he an influence?

AH: Forster was a huge influence on this book. I think a lot of people were pissed at him for writing A Passage to India, and I have a feeling that there are people who may not like what I have to say in my book about Israel, and I think that’s because our messages are the similar, which is that in a bad political system, people from different backgrounds, even if they have the best intentions, can seriously mess up each other's lives once they mix. I also like Forster’s strong female characters, his noble upper middle-class matriarchs, of which the mother, Mrs. Michaelson, in my book was a descendant. Other influences that were important include Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I was interested in these women who run families behind the scene and whose power is constantly under-estimated because of their sex. Also, I was interested in their belief in good manners, and doing things nicely, as if the world's problems could all go away if everyone would just behave themselves. Who knows? Maybe there’s something to that.

MS: A Passage to India is my favorite Forster book, by far.

AH: For me, Howards End is up there too. I go back and forth.

MS: Why were people pissed about Passage to India?

AH: I think at the time British people were none too flattered by his portrait of them and their colonialism. In those days, Westerners felt like they were doing a favor to their colonial subjects by bringing them the benefits of Western civilization. (It’s not unlike some of the confusion expressed by supporters of the war in Iraq. We’ve done the Iraqis a favor by liberating them and look how they repay us!) Particularly the Anglo-Indian community were pretty pissed off and felt caricatured. Today, however, I've heard that Indian writers are upset by Forster's portrayal of Indian characters in the book. But I don't think it was Forster’s intention to stereotype or poke fun at anyone gratuitously. Forster believed in "round" and "flat" characters, and I think you'll find that there are examples of both round and flat in both English and Indian camps.

MS: I felt there was a very generous way that you let us get inside the heads of all different kinds of people. Both of your books take place outside the U.S. I'm now writing a book about Argentina and was wondering if you ever feel presumptuous writing, for example, about a Palestinian character? Given all the factors in the way, including, for example, a whole different conception of the world, how could you ever know how he or she really feels?

AH: That's an interesting question about writing about the "other." Do you know, so far no one has asked me about this issue—how it feels to write about someone who’s not American. Instead they ask how hard must it have been for me as a man to write from the point of view of a woman. But my answer to both questions is the same. I write from a radical egalitarian philosophy. To me, all people are equal and our differences are more culturally created rather than real. I don't believe, for example, there is such a thing as a "man" or a "woman" any more than I believe there is such a thing as a "big-eared person" or "small-eared person." At the same time, because of the associations we make with certain physiological differences, growing up with or without a penis, or in New York versus in Ramallah, West Bank, can make deep impressions on us. Yet at root, we are all human. I must believe that or I see no reason to go on. As writers, we have to try to escape our own perspectives, even if we're not successful.

That said, one of the things that helped me understand George, one of my Palestinian characters, was that he was gay, so that gave me an entree, and then I let research and imagination do the rest.

MS: I’m curious about what you say about the necessity to try to escape our own perspectives as writers, "even if we're not successful.” I've also spoken to Indians who feel that Forster's Indians are not really Indian. I think it's an interesting question. So should Forster have stuck to writing about only British people, so as not to risk being presumptuous or getting it wrong? I don't think so. I think the will and the imaginative gesture are important. Then, of course, we also want to read Indian writers writing about Indians, and Indians writing about Brits and so on, all of which becomes more and more excitingly possible in this moment of global literature.

Your sex scenes were remarkable and functioned on so many levels, astonishingly funny and also sexy, with the emotional register fully there as well. I especially liked the way the characters leap from feelings of initial attraction to the desire two minutes later to say "I love you" or "he's my boyfriend" or "I'm sorry to be breaking up your marriage.” These were the parts when I think I laughed the most.

Do you feel that the gay experience is being represented fully, or at least adequately, in the literature of the moment? Do you think this is even a relevant question?

AH: Thanks. For me, the issue of how and whether to write about sex is the same as how and whether to write about a meal a character has had. If it says something relevant to character and/or plot, include it. Otherwise, just say they had lunch and move on.

No, I don't think the gay experience is being represented fully. We have an over-abundance of coming-out stories and relationship stories, but we don't see gay characters doing all the things that straight characters do. What I mean by this is, when a heterosexual character is at the center of a novel, his or her plot is not necessarily defined by sexuality. But if you had a gay cop, for example, in a novel, he would have to be struggling with how he's accepted by the straight cops on the force, or trying to find Mr. Right instead of trying to find a criminal. I also think that whoever it is that decides these things in the literary world has determined that gay books can be literary if they stay in their ethnic enclave, but they daren't be too uppity and attempt to address more universal issues. Only straight white Christian males are allowed to write the Great American Novel or the Great British Novel, etc. I think that's why The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst was so startling to many people, because it combined the gay sexuality plot line with a sprawling epic scope about the way life was lived in 1980s Thatcherite Britain. I'd love to see an American gay author tackle something that big on this side of the ocean.

MS: I'd like to take a look at the Hollinghurst book.

Yeah, what about a woman writing the Great American Novel? I think literature by women is put in similar category. While there was a moment in the seventies, when the feminist movement was at its peak in this country, that literature by women was being read by everyone and considered by everyone as important, that is no longer the case. While more women than men are reading and writing today, you would never know this by reading book reviews. More books by men than women are reviewed, and a higher percentage of reviewers are male.

What happens in these situations of a literature being marginalized is interesting. Women read men's books, as well as women's books, but men don't read women's books. This means that women (you could substitute gay people here, or Africans or South Americans) gain a broader understanding not only of their own worlds and minds, but also of the male universe. Of course, all these universes intersect, or rather there's the larger part of the circle that we all share, the part about being human, and then smaller parts of each circle that are more specific - being a woman in the world in a woman's body is in certain senses really different than being a man. Reading something written from a perspective that is not familiar to you, whether it be because of gender or race or culture or time period or sexual orientation, is harder. You are asked to strain your brain in different ways. It's similar to reading in a foreign language or reading a stylistic literary experiment. New neural pathways are opened. Women as the "underdogs" actually end up being more enlightened, because they have read and thought about what it feels to be a man, whereas men remain in the dark about the female experience. The same thing applies culturally. For example, Argentines have read not only all their own literature but the literatures of the rest of the world as well, or at least of the Western tradition. I'm always astonished by their erudition. But to them, stuck, as they see it, at the "ends of the earth", this seems a necessity. Whereas how many Americans have any knowledge at all of Argentine literature? The dominant culture, with no necessity to look beyond itself, ends up more ignorant than anyone else.

I actually precisely found that refreshing about your book, that the character's sexuality seemed to be one of the multiple things that was going on in his life, along with his father's imminent death, some sort of recent rebellious depressive breakdown - that also wasn't especially related to him being gay. And then, moreover, he ends up in this environment, Israel, where the primary concerns and tensions REALLY lie elsewhere. In a funny way, I even think the fact that BOTH the Michaelson sons were gay defused, or at least decentralized the issue, giving you that much more room to talk about other things.

What kind of literary trends do you distinguish at the moment? Do you find them interesting or lamentable? Where do you think the most interesting writing is being produced?

AH: One trend I don't like is this idea of taking a great book and reusing the same plot and simply recasting it with contemporary characters. The worst example of this is On Beauty by Zadie Smith, which to my mind misses the point of E. M. Forster's Howards End by attempting to recreate it slavishly in contemporary academia. By focusing so intensely on how to shoehorn Forster’s characters and action into a contemporary setting, Smith in my opinion missed the magic of that earlier book, which was to raise the issue of how do people who are radically different from one another connect? He wasn’t dealing with rival academics on the Harvard campus, but with the whole social spectrum of England.

As far as where the most interesting writing is being produced, I don't know because I'm sure there's very interesting writing going on all over the globe that I'm not aware of. But I think there's so much interesting writing from the past that's being neglected because it's only encountered in classrooms. I wish people would read Hardy, for example, on their own and relish him for the radical artist that he is. Or Jane Austen. If you compare her sentence structures with those of David Foster Wallace, for example, a contemporary writer who is very talented and often thought of as radical, you would see that Austen mixes things up in a number of bewildering ways you wouldn't expect.

MS: I read through all the Hardy novels in a stretch a few years ago. I find his descriptions of the natural world unparalleled really, and his characters, especially his female characters, so satisfyingly large and complex.

Now we're in a moment when what is known as World Literature is beginning to be considered important by everyone, i.e., literature from across the globe, and especially outside the Western tradition or coming from the Third World and published in translation. This is extremely exciting, though has yet to be reflected in such establishment venues as the New Yorker. I think this literature is really calling into question the ironic post-modern aesthetic and the reverberations will continue.

AH: Who's on your bookshelf right now? I just finished Mary Gordon's beautiful stories, as well as the savagely funny Blue Angel by Francine Prose, which is a must for anyone who's ever participated in a writing workshop. I've also been reading a fine story collection called The Last Flight of Jose Luis Balboa by a new writer named Gonzalo Barr, whom I became acquainted with online. He writes clean, sharp prose and a sure hand with plot, which is not easy in stories. I'm also taking a stab at Man's Fate by Malraux.

MS: Some of what I’m reading now is research for the novel I'm writing about Buenos Aires, including a wonderful book by Argentine sociologist Juan Jose Sebreli called Buenos Aires, Daily Life and Alienation, also Polish exile Witold Gombrowicz's Argentine diaries. Otherwise I'm catching up on some of the great contemporary voices, Coetzee, Sebald. I'm having trouble with Jelinek, who was presented to me by a friend as a writer tackling desire in a new way. I was very excited about the prospect, imagining that she was somehow picking up where Marguerite Duras left off, but I don't think that's what's happening. Though her narrative strategies may be, her vision of desire doesn't seem particularly new to me, turning around violence and sado-masochism. (I'm as curious as the next person about sado-masochism, was actually recently reading and enjoying Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs - I just don't think it's new.)

I spent several weeks wandering inside Murakami's novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, utterly riveted, to the point where it actually really excites me that that book was written in my lifetime. Though none of his other books enchanted me to the same degree, I think he's a great contemporary voice, if a bit uneven, but that seems part of his improvisational charm. Eliza Minot's The Brambles, just out, is a beautiful novel that goes against all the clichés of the American suburb, turning it into a mystical place. Finally, I recently read, in manuscript form, a fascinating and provocative political novel by a young Argentine, Pola Oloixarac.

So what are you working on now?

AH: I'm wrapping up a novel set in contemporary Berlin, about a love triangle involving an American-Jewish couple living abroad and a Russian émigré who comes between them.

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