Q: The opening of this novel is quite notable. What inspired you to open with the text of a grant application?
A: Personal experience-I almost came to the end of my life writing a Guggenheim grant. They are not easy to write. Then one year I was a judge and got to read hundreds of these applications. There was blood on the paper; these people were so desperate. Peter Laue, the scholar writing this application, is just dying of loneliness. He almost loses it in the last two paragraphs when he talks about going down to visit and being unable to go over and join the others. He does manage to pull himself back together at the very end and assert that this grant would allow him to pursue all this much further. I am very proud of the tone of this application.
Q: Did it pose a challenge to you as a writer to open with the end of the story and then make the body of the novel compelling and interesting to your readers? Did you plan to structure the story this way from the outset?
A: Well, originally the grant was at the end of the story. I dropped it off at Random House and my former editor, a dear and generous person, said, "I will buy this if you put the grant application up front and shift from the third to the first person." And I did it-after going home and kicking some furniture. I still have trouble with the grant being up front. I think it confuses some readers who don't know what to make of it. But it also gains readers who find the application intriguing. And, in my editor's words, it gives readers a reason to care about this failure who is going around screwing girls.
The grant was easy to move; I just shifted it from the back to the front. Changing from third to first person was more difficult, but my editor was right. I thought I had cleaned up the prose and made it as guy-like and colloquial as I could. But when I had to change "he thinks" to "I think," it helped me to refine my prose in an interesting way. It kept me out of trouble because I kept worrying I had no business being in this guy's mind-I didn't know what he was thinking. It was easier to put words in his mouth because I have heard men speak, but I don't know how their minds work.
Q: Your portrait of the artist as a young and older man does not conform to stereotypical notions of the great artist as a selfish, self-destructive individual. Why is this so?
A: Wanda Landowska made an enormous impression upon me when I was a child. She was this wonderful musician who had a couple take care of her. She was so out of this world that it took two able-bodied people to help her navigate it. When you think of Picasso-what a wide swath he cut-you think of this self-absorbed stereotype. Yet there were good times to be had around him. Much of this negative kind of stuff originates with the people surrounding artists-friends, lovers-who like to bitch and moan. Yet nobody makes them stick around, and obviously they have rich lives while they are in this artistic orbit.
And many artists are goodhearted. Living the life of a writer in California, I have never met a mean one. I'm currently reading a wonderful biography of Mary McCarthy; she lived in this world in which she and the artists around her were as mean as snakes. But you can approach life and art and be kindhearted. Alison Lurie, Diane Johnson, Alice Adams-they're generous, good women who are also artists. Working in PEN, you see artists who are working hard for a community and doing good and decent work. It's a canard that in order to be an artist you must be selfish and self-destructive. We have all met miserable people who stay up and drink and treat people badly and try to pass themselves off as artists. "I'm an aspiring artist, thus I behave like this." But these are most often people who are not attending to or doing their work, so are they really artists?
Q: Some harsh words are said in this novel about the state of art in the late twentieth century. Does this viewpoint reflect your own? Are you hoping for an artist like Bob who can transcend the irony and cynicism of our time?
A: Yes. This century has come to be known as the age of angst and depression and anxiety. As an English professor who has taught courses on how this movement started in poetry and fiction, I have dealt endlessly with these themes of anomie and depression. Writers like Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot were writing out of their own personal experiences and within the context of World War I, which was a terrible thing. Works like The Wasteland and A Farewell to Arms tapped into something the public responded to. Yet there is also evidence that once T. S. Eliot married a nice woman, he cheered up and created works of a very different and more optimistic tone. These works don't make it into the anthologies-they are seen as kind of embarrassing. In the case of Hemingway, who was, of course, a wonderfully talented writer, he was dealing with mental illness all along, and this colored his work in a very particular way. After seventy-five years of the Age of Anxiety, as we enter a new century I hope we can find a new way of looking at the world.
Q: The Handyman might be called a valentine to struggling artists everywhere. What do you think of this interpretation?
A: That's a darling interpretation, and it's true. It's a valentine to artists who have lost their way. It's also a valentine to young guys. Since women have begun writing on a regular basis, a great deal of work has been produced that is very tough on men. Men have been demonized in life and art. Yet there are so many nice guys out there who are confused but who are trying do the right thing. The question is: What is the right thing?
Q: Why do you think it's so difficult for people to find their true calling? What is it about Bob that allows him to find his way and help so many others to do so?
A: Margaret Mead once said that in America everything looks easy because this is the land of abundance, but emotionally it's very distracting because there are so many choices. The son of a barber in a small Spanish town will probably grow up to be a barber and not be too upset about it-it's his destiny. Picasso's father was an academic artist. So Picasso grew up in the art world and was expected to be an artist, though probably not the artist he became. In this country, ostensibly, you can be whatever you want and that can be paralyzing, like when you have too many errands to do on a Saturday afternoon and don't know where to start so you don't do anything. In America, at least if you're white, you're supposed to be able to become whatever you want to be. What you want to be is a big question, and this seems to me to be a real cause for anxiety.
When Bob thinks of art, he has daydreams of Paris in the 1920s, but that world doesn't exist anymore. He has to get past his dream of art to find out what is really out there that he has to work with. And he does that by returning home and entering the world.
Q: Do you think art can be taught in a classroom?
A: A little bit. Skiers need coaches and so do artists. As a professor of English and writing, I teach my students to pay attention to character and plot. What is your plot? Do you believe it? Will your readers?
Years ago, a friend and I were asked to write the last episode of Barnaby Jones, a detective series in which the central character caught the criminal red-handed in a grassy knoll at the end of every episode. (When we wrote that Barnaby runs over to the criminal, we got laughed at because by that time he was an old geezer who couldn't run.) And there had to be a murder by the bottom of page eight with four suspects. We thought we might want to do more television writing, and we needed the money, so we didn't want to screw this up. But we really struggled with the question: Why would anybody want to kill anybody? We finally came up with the idea of an unfaithful husband, which seemed to offer real motive. Here was a reason for murder that made some sense to us, at least. You have to believe your plot.
Teaching students to pay attention to motivation, elements of time and space, and point of view are important. Just as skiers are coached to keep the skis parallel unless they want to stop, writers need to be coached. I think coaching rather than teaching is a more apt metaphor here.
Q: Since the story is told from Bob's point of view, we get his honestly brutal perspective on the people he encounters that summer. How would the other characters describe Bob during that summer?
A: They would hardly think of him at all. There's an evolution over the course of the story as they come to realize that they really like him. But he is not a fabulous artist; he's just a handyman at this point in time. He's crushed when he realizes that Mrs. Walker has taken up with her manicurist and she asks if he expected her to make do with a handyman and an iguana. In retrospect, as with Kate, who is tracked down in the south of France, Mrs. Walker remembers him as a dear, sweet boy. At the time, she did not give him too much thought, and nobody probably did. That often happens in life: Looking back, you realize that someone was such a wonderful and important person in your life, but in the moment you did not. He is after all a handyman-not a person you devote too much time to thinking about.
Q: How would Bob articulate their effect on him in 2027?
A: He wouldn't articulate it. When the scholar, Peter Laue, goes down and asks him questions about them, Bob is amused, but he won't say anything. An art historian who reviewed The Handyman called Bob a "dumb" artist-he does it but can't articulate it. He knows what he is doing, but he does by doing and not talking about it.
He is terribly grateful. You can see this because he's kept so many of them in his life and he keeps painting them. I am most proud of him for continuing to paint his trailer park relatives, of whom he is the most ashamed. But he has forgiven them and accepted them. He comes to recognize that their lives are just as mysterious and important as anybody else's and just as worthy of being painted.
Q: What makes Bob so appealing to the women in this novel?
A: I think because he is available to them. He is ready to not just build a turkey pen but to spend an entire afternoon trying to catch the turkey. He is willing to sit down and talk, and he listens. As a previously divorced mother, I can tell you there is a very interesting line between those men who merely react to your children as annoyances and those who are willing to engage them and join in their games. And it's not just the women. His roommate, Dave, the philosopher, is desperately lonely. He is looking for a friend and Bob is there.
Q: Reflecting on his new job as a handyman, Bob says, "There was a certain amount of sadness to a lot of this work. Somebody else should have been doing these jobs." Could you talk about the meaning of this passage?
A: That's where I'm a feminist author. We live in a patriarchy, but many of the patriarchs seem to have ducked out for a smoke. The most lonely thing in the world is to be in a room and a relationship with someone who is just not there-and it works both ways. Angela's husband is there, but he's not. He firmly believes that he's doing his job as a husband and father by returning from his absences to ask who is responsible for this mess. His daughter says that he is a nice dad but limited, and she's right. We're such a career-oriented society, and people-men and women alike-are so bent on following and advancing their careers. I do think, in a semi-metaphorical way, people should stay at home. They should pay attention to their primary, not their secondary, lives. Getting tenure or selling the most computer software is not the most important thing.
Q: Ultimately, this novel offers a very hopeful message on the transcendent power of love and art. Some reviewers have commented that this is a bold move on your part in a literary landscape littered with irony and detachment. Do you agree with this assessment?
A: Yes, I do. I think one of my favorite reviews refers to me as the "ever-adventurous" Carolyn See. I love that. What a nice idea. After devouring all 869 pages of a wonderful new biography of Mary McCarthy, it became clear to me that in the mid-twentieth-century New York art world, it was all about being mean. How mean can you be? Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett-they were like a Mason jar full of scorpions. Like the man with limburger cheese on his mustache who thinks the whole world stinks, they thought they were the center of the universe and that was how artists should behave. How tiring.
I want to ask: What if people, artists, tried to be decent and generous? Let's try this other way and see what happens. After enduring a stormy childhood and failed marriages, I finally noticed that the less awful you are, the nicer your life can be. I would like to try to point to something new for the next century.
Q: In this novel, you reclaim Los Angeles as a utopia of sorts, though the current popular perception of Los Angeles is far more dystopian. Do you agree with this assessment?
A: I remember a conversation I had at a party in New York a few years ago. In an exchange with an inane young man, the American version of the upper-class twit, complete with a receding chin, I mentioned that I was from California. He replied, "Oh well, I think New York is the brains of the country and Los Angeles is the genitals." As you can imagine, I was insulted and irritated and later thought of the many things I should have said in reply. Then I thought to myself, "Would I rather be stuck with the headache or the orgasm?"
Q: There is a very large cast of characters in this novel, yet each is rendered vivid and distinct. How do you manage to juggle all of these voices?
A: Thank you for saying this. I am very complimented. I spent a lot of time and energy to accomplish just this. I did a huge amount of eavesdropping to get the cadences of these characters right and make them distinct. Also a lot of careful remembering, as I based some of these characters on people I've known in the past.
Q: June Shaw is a remarkable character. If she had relented, could she and Bob have had something?
A: June Shaw looks and acts like a friend from hell. Bob is rendered speechless and frantic when he wakes up and realizes that they've had sex. If June had said, "So, do we see each other tomorrow?" he would have fled the country or at least moved out. Bob does see through her mask of fiendish energy to the dear woman within. Maybe nobody else will ever see through her prickly facade to the soul. Perhaps this is why she so cherishes him.
I love June's character because she's one of those women born to make trouble. She's able to become a feminist and channel her energy. Before, women like her were forced to stay at home and make trouble there. She's so bats and tweaked, you just don't know what she's going to say next. She can't keep her clothes on. They keep flying off her because she has so much energy to burn. She's enormously smart, but also berserk, and she is going to stay that way. She is an amalgam of several women I've known who have astounded me and for whom I have great affection.
Q: This novel traces the development of an artist. Does it mirror your own process of becoming a writer in any way?
A: Well, I wish I were as kind as Bob, but I'm not. It's true that finding your own material is crucial, and I'm very lucky to have found mine. Bob's material is all around, but he doesn't know it at first. I think every artist needs to find his or her own stuff. Mary McCarthy had a grinding sense of injustice and anger toward her aunt and uncle that kept her in a tizzy throughout her life, and this was the source material of her art. Larry McMurtry is from Archer City, Texas, a little town in the middle of nowhere. He looked around and decided Archer City, Texas, was his source. Out of this came The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove-nobody else could have written these novels. I love it when you see an artist and his or her material in a happy marriage.
Q: How would you recommend aspiring writers learn and hone their craft? Is there a blueprint?
A: My dad had two kinds of chili he made: eighteen-hour chili, which was incredible and incredibly time-consuming, and quick chili, which took twenty minutes and was pretty good! Here is my quick-chili recipe for writing: one thousand words a day, five days a week, for the rest of your life; no more than two hours of revisions a day. Also, one charming note a week (on paper, not e-mail) to a writer, editor, or other person in the literary world whose work you admire. No asking for favors; just tell them you enjoy and respect their work. This is part of the process of constructing a literary life. And, most important, once every couple of weeks do something outrageous that a person "like you" would never do. It's important to have both an inner and an outer life-the writing and notes take care of the inner life, and the crazy thing expands you and makes a bigger person.
Q: What do you think of the phenomenon of the reading group, which seems to have assumed a new prominence in recent years?
A: It's terrific, a wonderful thing. It provides people with a chance to come together and socialize around the essentially lonely experience of reading. It's wonderful to be able to talk to others about what you have read. I think it also, in some small way, refutes the naysayers who argue that Americans don't read, that our educational system is going down the drain, that the whole country in general is going to hell in a handbasket. It's just so civilized to come together and think not just about the mundane matters of everyday life.
Q: Do you belong to a reading group?
A: Unfortunately, no! Since I have to read one book a week for my job as reviewer for the Washington Post, I just don't have the time. I did recently get lost in a wonderful unassigned book, which meant that for ten days papers did not get corrected, bills did not get paid, and I almost missed a deadline for a book review.
Q: What would you recommend to reading groups as future selections?
A: Frances Kiernan's terrific biography of Mary McCarthy [Seeing Mary Plain]. Also, a new novel, The Dangerous Husband by Jane Shapiro, made me laugh out loud.
Q: What is next for you? Are you working on a new project?
A: I just signed a two-book contract. One is a nonfiction book on how to make a literary life-the eighteen-hour chili version. The other is a novel about the globalization of the world, examining the drama around organ donorship and global adoption. It will be filled with thoughtful, intelligent, entirely decent people who get a shot at realizing their wildest dreams.
Excerpted from The Handyman © Copyright 2009 by Carolyn See. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.
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