An Interview With Fiction Writers Emily Barton and Gary Shteyngart

It's been called the loneliest number since the number one. But for novelists Emily Barton and Gary Shteyngart, No. 2 has drawn a rather friendly crowd of readers.

In March, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Barton's second book, Brookland, a historical novel set in eighteenth-century Brooklyn. Two months later, Random House released Gary Shteyngart's sophomore effort, Absurdistan, the tale of an obese Russian trying desperately to return to the United States.

Each of these second books garnered reviews that would make most authors blush: She was compared to Tolstoy; he was called "a giant mounted on horseback." Luckily, they were used to the praise. Both Barton and Shteyngart had published first novels—The Testament of Yves Gundron (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) and The Russian Debutante's Handbook (Riverhead Books, 2003), respectively—to almost universal acclaim.

Both authors are profiled in the July/August 2006 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine ("Two Books Are Better Than One" by Kevin Larimer), and, like most young authors, they have a lot to say. The following are excerpts from the interviews that won't be found in the magazine.

Emily Barton on Education and Self-Esteem: My education was like...I was rewarded for good scholarship and I was not rewarded for poor scholarship. And there’s something tough about that, but there’s also something that teaches you habits of rigor. And I have the sense—I’m not sure if it’s systematic or societal—but I get the sense that most of my undergrads [at Bard College], who are half my age or a little less than half my age...I have the sense that a lot of their education is focused on self-esteem. People our age and certainly in the generations preceding us didn’t learn that, and suffered and hurt because they weren’t taught that, you know, actually it’s fine how you are, each of us learns differently. But I think the backlash, the cost of that, is that if it comes without a counterbalance in rigor and scholarship it can lead to this unfocused desire to express yourself without boundaries, without a sense of an audience, without a sense of earning the privilege. So when I see memoirs that seem to me self-serving or confessional poetry that seems to me uninteresting and banal, I tend to attribute it to that.

Gary Shteyngart on the Role of Literature in Culture: When I finished The Russian Debutante's Handbook, or finished the first version of the ending, I was twenty-three-years-old, I had just finished school, and I was full of optimism. My first optimism was that literature would continue to play a predominant role in our culture—so way off base that I can’t even begin to tell you how stupid I feel these days. When I graduated, I lived at The Strand [bookstore]. The Strand was everything. And I thought that most New Yorkers, most people really shared this [perspective]. This is what happens when you grow up in a literary household, a Russian-speaking household, and then you go to Oberlin College where people also give more credence to this. It took a while to understand that even at the top of your game—and I’m not at the very top of the game either—but even at the top of the literary game it’s a very minor part of our culture, and becoming increasingly so, which is the worrisome part.

It was more a part of our culture in Hemingway’s day and in Faulkner’s day maybe. I think in some ways we’re moving away from a culture that’s narrative-driven. It’s not just books—movies are taking a huge hit these days also. The rise of the video game is very symptomatic. People want to be the hero. I think this also points to the huge rise in writing programs while there’s a huge decline in reading rates and rates of literacy, as part of the NEA report ["Reading at Risk"], for example. Less people are reading and more people are writing. Everyone says, "I got a story in me." It’s true: We all have a story. But they’re not interested in reading other people’s work. They’re only interested in getting their own story out, much as one wants to control the character in a video game.

Emily Barton on Negative Reviews: I don’t go in search of them. Sometimes you can’t avoid them. Sometimes you just stumble upon them or someone sends one to you... There were a few negative reviews of my first book, including the New York Times review, which was not only mean-spirited but also in many instances grammatically incorrect. A spectacularly badly written and also mean review. And the amount of anonymity that I harbor against the writer of that review is out of proportion to the misdeeds, and so I just decided that one way to decrease the suffering in the world is to not hate people who I don’t know unnecessarily. In an ideal world—I’ve thought about it a lot—the better way to end suffering would be to be able to read the negative review and not take it personally and not create hatred toward that person. But since I’m apparently not able to do that as yet I’m just steering clear of those situations.

Gary Shteyngart on the Memoir Craze: To me the memoir craze represents a very simple idea: that we all have a story worth telling. Well, I happen to agree with that. I think we all do. Each life is fascinating, but as much as I wouldn’t begin to express myself as a painter because I have no visual skills, likewise I think most people think, "Well, it’s words. I’ll just put them together and they will equal effective memoir." In some ways it’s reminiscent of Reality TV. The real being the more immediate, more compelling. But in some ways fiction is a lot more real than nonfiction, or it could be. For me George Saunders’s short stories are a much better indication of the state of America than if I turn on the television and watch fat fifteen-year-olds host three-hundred-thousand dollar bat mitzvahs.

Emily Barton on the Influence of 9/11 on the Writing of Brookland: I live very close to the Brooklyn Bridge, and...in the months directly following September 11 the Brooklyn Bridge was considered a prime target. It was under helicopter surveillance. So the neighborhood—first of all, there were choppers and they are loud and they have search lights and they were just kind of strafing the neighborhood night after night. I really became fascinated—in the way that you can be fascinated by something horrible—with the idea that someone was going to blow up the bridge and what that would mean psychologically to the city. There is something in the very process of making something that big in a work of fiction that makes you want to take it down. There was always some narrative propulsion toward harming [the bridge in Brookland]. So whether that came from September 11 or whether that just kind of funneled into it I’m not really sure.

Gary Shteyngart on Reality TV: I’ve only seen maybe one or two Reality TV shows, and I like the ones where they go on a date. I love those. Those are hysterical because they really teach me a lot about the culture, the culture being southern California, but a culture anyway. There’s this one, I think it’s called Blind Date. These two Southern Californians go on a date and the guy says to the girl, “So um, do you like to do stuff?” And she says, “Yeah, yeah, totally, I like to do stuff.” He’s like “Aw, that’s cool.” And then he’s like, “Oh we have a lot in common.” That’s the kind of stuff I go bonkers for.