It can be very difficult to use teenage characters as narrators, to make them both plausible but also sufficiently articulate to convey the ideas of a novel. Did you find it difficult to create Mathilda’s voice?
Strangely, I didn’t find it difficult at all. Mathilda’s voice arrived in my head one morning, with great force and clarity. I knew immediately that this was the voice of a child and though the first words seemed a bit ominous (‘I want to be awful. I want to do awful things’), I knew that the words had no evil in them, but rather issued forth from a character of incredible willfulness and energy, someone refusing to be contained. I really can’t begin any piece of writing without this deep connection to a voice. If I have to struggle to get the voice right, I simply accept that this is not my story to tell, this is not a character to whom I can do justice. With Mathilda I felt, from the start, that I knew her in my body, in my breath. The music of her voice was natural to me, and I spoke every word out loud, for years, as I was writing the book. Truly, I felt more like a secretary than a writer. Where such voices come from is one of the mysteries of the writing process and one that I tend not to question.
Why did you choose to name the novel after Mathilda herself, even though the events of the book are driven by Helene’s life and death?
As I see it, this is clearly Mathilda’s book. Yes, Helene is a vital part of the story, but it is Mathilda’s quest to understand her sister that truly gives the novel its centre, its heart. Mathilda is asking the questions, Mathilda is the one trapped on the island of grief, as she calls it. And really the book is about much more than the mystery of Helene’s death. This tragedy sets the stage for Mathilda to act out her deep confusion, her anger, her sexuality. And though she does find some answers about her sister, the real reward is that she finds herself.
The world in which Mathilda and her sister are growing up is inevitably partly a creation of post-9/11 America, but you also describe a second major terrorist attack at a later date. Why did you decide to move the political landscape on from an entirely contemporary setting?
It was sort of an intuitive choice. But I guess, in some ways, by pushing the novel five minutes into the future, it allowed me to put myself (and ultimately the reader) in the same position as Mathilda – the position of an innocent in an unsteady world, not knowing what might happen next. This seemed to increase the danger and excitement of the story. The novel unfolds in a very ‘present-tense’ sort of way, with Mathilda recording events as they happen. During the writing process I was breathing with Mathilda, breath for breath, and rarely ahead of her. In wanting the reader to have this same experience, it was useful to include certain events in the larger world that would be as new to the reader as they are to Mathilda.
Mathilda’s social life reflects the intensity of friendships between teenage girls and the way that such bonds can be quite calculated. Did you find this tricky, as a man, to depict?
Again, not really. I grew up surrounded by women – I lived in a house with my mother and both grandmothers and I spent my summers at the home of my female cousins. Being a very quiet and shy child, I often put myself in corners, saying little but watching everything. In my plays my main characters are usually women. I tend to write from outside myself, sometimes from way outside myself. I have a play with all black characters (I am white). It just seems to be fertile territory for me. And it doesn’t seem so strange to me, to write from the perspective of a woman, or from a person of another race. Don’t we all have a bit of the other inside us? To recognize this, to accept this is, I think, a very civilizing thing.
Mathilda is often very manipulative; is this more of a hangover from childhood or the emergence of an adult trait?
Your question brings to mind the epigraph I included in the book, a quote from the writer G.K. Chesterton: ‘For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy’. Yes, Mathilda is manipulative, but she feels great wrongs have been perpetrated and she is willing to do whatever is necessary to bring the culprits, as she perceives them, to justice. She often lies, not least of all to herself. Over the course of the novel she begins to see her own faults more clearly and, in doing so, she becomes more forgiving of others. She moves from a merciless campaign for justice to her first fitful attempts at offering mercy. This movement, which is essentially one toward adulthood, brings her to a more grounded place, a place where her wiles and manipulations are less necessary.
Are there novels and novelists you would cite as an inspiration for writing Mathilda Savitch?
I have sometimes, playfully, imagined my book as a strange combination of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: two books, two voices, that I love – and books that, when I was young, made me want to write a novel. I’m generally inspired by a gripping voice, one with great authority, capable of taking me inside the heart and mind of another person (the ultimate virtual reality). Other first person novels that I adore: William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow; Kazuo Ishiguru’s The Remains of the Day; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping; Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy; Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; Anne Enright’s The Gathering; Willa Cather’s My Antonia; Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal; Dennis Cooper’s Guide; W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.
Did writing something that you knew didn’t have to be realised as a stage production give you more freedom to tell the story just as you wanted?
One of the things that delighted me, in writing the novel, was the freedom to let the story unfold over a greater length of time. In a play, the magic circle drawn around the characters is usually, by necessity, much tighter. When crafting a play, I invariably find that I write more scenes than I can actually use. In a play too much extra material, too many diversions, can be fatal, especially if these things impede the sense of inevitability, the sense that we are witnessing characters caught in the wheels of fate. And while a novel’s power can be reduced by excess baggage as well (and, in writing mine, I do think I applied my playwright’s habit of precision), the form is, without a doubt, a roomier affair – one that allows the characters to have a few more detours of thought and situation. And, having fallen so deeply in love with Mathilda, I thoroughly enjoyed being able to give her a more generous life.
Will this be a one-off foray into novel writing or are you planning to write more fiction?
I loved writing this novel. It was incredibly challenging and I had to use all these new parts of my brain. I’ve already started a second book. And if your next question is: can you tell us something about it? My answer would be: no. I like to keep secrets. And the truth is, I really couldn’t tell you very much about it. Similar to how Mathilda Savitch began, all I have at this point is a voice, and a vague intuition as to where the story is going. As Arthur Miller once said (I’ll paraphrase): there’s a play in your blood and you write until you find it. Play, novel, poem, it doesn’t matter what I’m working on, at the beginning the writing is always a simple, and terrifying, act of faith.
]]>I know it must sound odd, even a bit precious, to speak of Mathilda as separate from myself, as some sort of stray radio frequency buzzing in my ear. Perhaps the perception of this ‘other’ is nothing more than a trick my brain plays on itself. Nonetheless, I seem unable to get very far as a writer unless some part of me is convinced that my characters have lives and wills separate from my own. Of course, over time I began to see that Mathilda and I had a lot in common. When I started the novel, it was almost exactly one year since 9/11. Terrorism hovers in the background of Mathilda’s world as well and, I suppose, by borrowing this child’s voice, I was able to address my own fear and confusion and anger in a very open and innocent way. It was liberating to write in the voice of a child, from the perspective of someone who is still learning the world and interpreting its complexities for the first time. Interestingly, for me the novel began one year after 9/11, whereas for Mathilda the story begins one year after the death of her beloved older sister. Her parents have become frozen by sadness and fail to provide the girl with any map or guidance on how to grieve. Mathilda must find her own way across this dark landscape.
This all sounds terribly depressing but, in fact, what I recall most vividly about the writing process is the way Mathilda made me laugh. It seems that when I’m dealing with some darkness in subject matter, my mind and body instinctively hunt out the humour. I don’t think I would have been able to spend six years working on this novel without the release of laughter.
Also, at the heart of the book is a mystery that Mathilda is attempting to solve, a mystery about her sister’s death. For a long time I remained in the dark, hunting for clues. I was rarely ahead of Mathilda. We edged toward the truth together. It was this detective work, coupled with the exuberance of the voice, that kept me writing.
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