The National Book Award-winning author of Landscape with Invisible Hand talks to EW about his prescient new book
M.T.
The author just didnt expect them to be so relevant when the book came out.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: The book is a quick but impactful read.M.T.
Credit: Sonya Sones; Candlewick Press,
Theres even something powerful, visually, about almost every other page leaving you with this vast blank space.
It puts an exclamation mark on things.What a wonderful thing to say.
I totally love that feeling.
It was fun to write in that form with those short sections.
Its so weird, sometimes, to realize that.
Many of us feel like its hard to make, for example, our own government see us.
Its hard to get Congress to understand what health care actually means to a lot of Americans.
To what extent do you think this book speaks directly to the current political climate?
Supposedly I had no idea what this political climate was.
Like it would seem like a throwback.
I thought, you know, I live in Massachusetts where weve had Romneycare for years.
So it was less of a problem then, you know what I mean?
If anything, I was worried that it would actually be irrelevant by the time it was published.
How am I going to make money?
How am I going to keep my head above water?
Thats the stuff that we care about, and so thats what we write about as writers.
I dont want to give this impression that its all a secret code or something.
That is, in a sense, I feel also a great representation of how it feels right now.
Kind of like a gap between that upper one percent and the rest of us.
That kind of thing thats what actually matters to me.
I think thats how a lot of artists feel right now.Its actually interesting.
It felt like that was a cop-out somehow.
Will there be a nuclear war as a result of someones cranky 4 a.m. tweet?
I think of books like1984skyrocketing on best-seller lists.Yeah, right.
It is sort of amazing to see people dressed in those handmaids outfits in real courtrooms.
Talk about the power of literature: That is the power of literature.
Shes performing strength a little bit there would you agree?Yeah.
In the late 90s, my father lost his job during the tech bubble.
That, I think, is the crux of what it ended up being.
I feel like thats another aspect of how we all are now.
So if there had been visitors to this planet, thats when they would have seen us.
They really would love us to behave as if it is the 1950s.
I think it was all done; there may have been copyediting changes after that.
But it was very much the mood in the country before that.
In the 90s, it seemed like we ignored what the government did.
What kind of tone did you want to end on?
Theyre going to struggle onward, but its not going to be easy.
I guess because none of us really know right now what direction to move in.
We know its become clear that the political machine has somehow broken down.
And yet we dont know exactly how to respond yet.
Theyre going to be reading all sorts of things that are going to contribute to a full worldview.
Thats really exciting, and its really wonderful that these people are seeing so many different facets of life.
I also wanted it to be an emotionally powerful novel, but also one thats about people.
Its about the events in the book.
Its not just supposed to be some kind of users manual showing our political moment.
