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I had glimpses of some kind of future technology that would be very important, but I didn’t know what it would be. But over time, I began to have a sense of what I wanted it to do.
Jennifer Egan talks about “The Candy House,” her sequel of sorts to her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” Alexandra Alter has news from the field. Plus, our critics Molly Young and Alexandra Jacobs join us to talk about books they’ve recently reviewed. This is the Book Review podcast. It’s April 29. I’m John Williams.
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Jennifer Egan is here. She’s the author of several novels, including “Look at Me” and “Manhattan Beach.” In 2011, she won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” Her new novel, “The Candy House,” is related to “Goon Squad.” We’ll find out just how and more. Hi, Jennifer. Thanks for being here.
Oh, thanks for having me.
There are many complexities to talk about in this book, but let’s start with something relatively straightforward. Who is Bix Bouton, one of your main characters, when we meet him at the start of the book?
Bix Bouton, when we meet him, is a very successful and iconic tech legend, who I am positing has invented social media. We met him briefly in “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” He was a very minor character, but he has now come into his own as this figure in American culture. But he’s actually in a crisis at age 41 because he feels like he has no new ideas. He’s blocked, if you will. And he’s looking for a solution to that problem, which has come to feel like a sort of personal crisis for him.
And even though Bix is made up, we’re in 2010, I believe, when the Obamas are in the White House and the rest of the world is recognizable.
Yes, exactly. Social media exists much as we knew it then, but the difference is that he did it and he’s become extremely wealthy and successful as a result.
So what does Bix trip upon for his next act, and how does that propel the rest of the book?
Bix has a wish to reconnect to his graduate-student years in some way, which he remembers as a time of great creativity and fertility and, really, the time when he came up with his original idea about social media. So he goes in disguise to a discussion group of Columbia professors. And his goal is just to get his mind moving and to get outside of his own identity, which results in everyone kowtowing to him because he’s this famous guy.
And he hears from an animal studies professor about technology that can externalize the consciousness of animals, and that this is being used for animal studies to understand how animals think. And over the course of several years, Bix develops this into what becomes a ubiquitous technology in American life that lets humans externalize their consciousnesses onto a very sleek, beautiful cube.
And what is this product called?
It’s called Own Your Unconscious, and the idea is that by externalizing your consciousness, you can remember, finally, all that has actually happened to you, as opposed to the tiny quantity that all of us remember of our lives. You can revisit childhood events from an adult perspective. You can find people again whom you may have glimpsed just once or twice in your life. So there are a lot of advantages to this. And, probably most appealing, you can re-infuse this whole and complete consciousness should you undergo, say, a traumatic brain injury or ultimately have dementia. The idea is, you can re-infuse this consciousness and be made whole again mentally.
And when you revisit these experiences in the past in your memories, is it as if you’re experiencing them again in a sort of VR kind of way?
Well, of course, this is where I take my creative license because what would that really be like? What is consciousness? So much of it is thought, and perception is so varied. What on Earth would it really mean to view it again, as it were, from a later point? I’m not sure. All I was doing was using this device to try to write a decent book that served my purposes and such.
But I should mention the other thing about the device, which is that what ultimately becomes very important is that Bix Bouton offers the chance, with this technology, to share all or part of one’s consciousness to a collective consciousness in exchange for equivalent access to the shared consciousnesses, all or part, of everyone else who has done the same. It’s all anonymous, but it’s all there. When Bix originally invented this, he assumed this would be used only sometimes. His real goal was just to give people access to the contents of their own minds.
But of course, unintended consequences when it comes to technology, we have all learned, become very important, and this becomes the norm, really, for many people. And so what that means is that people can view the consciousness of other people very easily. And they do, and that becomes a kind of key feature of American life as we move forward.
And you have in the book people you refer to as “eluders,” who are sort of like your Luddites, who are resistant to this technology. How elusive do they have to be? Can they just decline to take part, or what does that look like?
Eluding is a very radical step because the problem is that declining to take part only gets you so far. That basically means that either you’re only externalizing your consciousness and not sharing it or not even externalizing your consciousness. But the problem is that even if you decline to do all that, you are still fully represented in the collective because of all the people you’ve interacted with in your life who are sharing their consciousnesses.
In a way, a really good analogy for this is DNA analysis. If you want to find out if you have relatives out there, you have to share your own DNA results. And one thing that really surprised me is that— I can’t remember where I heard it, but basically, it doesn’t matter whether I share my results or even get my DNA analyzed. Enough people close to me have done it, at least in North America, that I am findable in this collective database. So this is sort of an exact analogy.
So eluders are so appalled and alienated by all of this and eager to escape it that they shed their own identities completely and become different people. They basically cede their old selves to the collective and move on with their lives as different people. And one person likens it to an animal chewing off its leg to escape from a trap.
And so they essentially started— the equivalent of starting a new life under a new identity and trying to just have people forget who they were before.
Exactly, but of course, that’s not easy because you can’t just disappear without everyone realizing that you’ve disappeared. So what eluders do is that they hire proxies to impersonate them online so that it’s not obvious that they’re gone. Some eluders are famous, so that’s a complicated job. Someone has to give the impression on the internet that this person is still active and living their lives.
And proxies can range in quality from just a program that is basically scrambling up all of your online utterances to try to maintain continuity and give the impression that you’re there, to, at the higher end, an actual person who does the job of impersonating the person who has eluded. And I sort of, with a wink and a smile, suggest in the novel that the best proxies are actually fiction writers, because this is what we do.
OK, so I don’t know if I’m talking to the real Jennifer Egan now or not. Is that what you’re saying?
Well, we don’t know. But I think my proxy is doing a good job if it’s not me.
A great job. So this is the central invention of the novel. There are a lot of characters around this. And we’re going to get into all of that in a second, or at least some of it. But I want to stick with the central idea for just a minute more and ask, because Own Your Unconscious is one of those inventions— and I mean when it’s invented by you, the author, not by Bix, though maybe that, too— that opens itself out onto all kinds of possible related big ideas. And I’m curious what you were most interested in exploring about it, in terms of its effects and in terms of its larger human questions.
The principle of both “The Candy House” and “A Visit From the Goon Squad” is really just following my own curiosity into people’s lives and futures. And in the course of doing that and over some years, because I actually began writing some of these stories in “The Candy House” as long ago as 2010, I had glimpses of some kind of future technology that would be very important, but I didn’t know what it would be.
But over time, I began to have a sense of what I wanted it to do. And a lot of that was driven by my own curiosity. So, for example, I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to write a piece in which characters are able to see what has become of people they’ve glimpsed just once in their lives? And honestly, that just comes from my own personal curiosity. I sometimes think of glancing encounters that I’ve had where I don’t even have enough identifying information about the person to even find out anything about them. And I’ll think, who were they? Who are they? I wish I could just go into their houses and see them. This is how my mind works.
So I thought about that. I thought, how could I write a chapter like that? What would be the occasion? Obviously, I’m the writer. I can do what I want. But I have to make it credible. I have to make it reasonable and invent a system of logic in which that is possible. And again and again, I found myself wanting to do things that required some kind of system of logic that let a narrator know everything about everyone.
Another thing I wanted to try was what I was thinking of as invasive omniscience, just so deep and able to go so deep into people so fast and know everything about them, what they’re ashamed of, what they’re afraid of, and then zoom back out and then do the same for someone else. And again, there has to be some kind of narrative environment in which that makes sense. And so, over time, the through line in all of this was some kind of collective consciousness, some way to access all that.
And so I also had Bix Bouton, who I started writing about in 2012, who I knew needed to invent something, but I didn’t know what it would be. And so these pieces came together. That’s how fiction works for me. It tends to be organic, a sense of different root systems finally moving toward each other, rather than a top-down case of me thinking, OK, here’s what’s going to happen. Here’s how I’m going to use it.
And ideally, the feeling I should have doing all this is a sense of freedom and openness. You mentioned in your question that this machine seems to open out into a lot of different possibilities. That’s always the feeling I want. I want a feeling of more pathways opening to me. And if I don’t have that, it’s a sign that I’m on the wrong track. So this machine did that for me, the writer, and so I really leaned into it and used it for all it was worth.
But, and to take you back— I don’t mean to take you back to a stressful moment when this might have happened, but you talked about writing the book for a while without having a machine, and the machine came late in the process. As those root systems are going into the ground, are there ever moments where you worry that they won’t connect? And could there have been “The Candy House” if you hadn’t come up with the cube?
No, I don’t think so, and especially because this is, in some ways, a more disparate set of characters than existed in “Goon Squad.” So the question of what would hold all of it together was enormous. I always have that feeling as I’m writing fiction, that it always feels like it could as easily not work out as work out. And it can be really uncomfortable and nerve wracking, but I’ve come to see it as just part of the job, writing amidst that uncertainty.
And in general, if I can just hold onto my curiosity and my improvisational instincts, that always seems to be my best ticket. So, in a certain way, what I’m relying on— and this is another kind of funny layer to all of it— I’m relying on all that I don’t know in my own consciousness to let me write fiction. And I think it’s no accident that this, quote unquote, “machine” that ends up being so important in the book is, to some degree, the sort of mental machine that I’m using to do my job and have from the beginning of my career.
Yes, the ultimate example of what you’re describing more metaphorically. Is it a process that always works out for you, or are there individual roots dangling somewhere that didn’t fit or didn’t turn into something that worked?
So many dangling roots, oh my God, especially with books like this. My last book, “Manhattan Beach,” was, in some ways, more self-contained in that it had a discrete group of characters whose stories I was following. With a book like “The Candy House,” I would say probably 50 percent of the first-draft material I generated ended up being unusable. And that, again, I try not to look at it as failure, although I can be very self-flagellating in my— I’m not always a good boss for myself.
But what I found is that, actually, a lot of this stuff does become usable in other forms and other ways. So it is in reserve. Sometimes it’s latent. I haven’t found a way to actually use things. But I try to think of it as just, I didn’t find all the right elements to make it work that time, but hopefully sometime.
Let’s get to the connection, at least briefly, because many people read “The Goon Squad” and enjoyed it. And I’ve heard this book described as a sequel, a sibling, a follow-up. How exactly did you get from there to here? And you mentioned starting writing it in 2010 or so, which is around the time “Goon Squad” came out.
Yeah, I mean, it’s the nature of both books that they are so open-ended in that there’s three basic structural ideas that I used for both. Each chapter is about a different person. Each chapter stands completely on its own. And each chapter has its own world and tone and feel. I want them to feel like they’re parts of different books.
So the nature of that— because each of us is the center of our own almost infinite world, really, of consciousness— the nature of that is that there’s so much that I don’t end up exploring from each chapter and each book. So there’s a tremendous open-endedness to it. And the whole enterprise is really driven by my own curiosity. So my curiosity continued to be active, even as “Goon Squad” was being published. Actually, on my book tour, I started working on one of the pieces that ended up being in this book.
And in terms of what drew my attention and my curiosity, it was often characters from “Goon Squad” who were so minor that either we may not remember them— in some cases, they were only mentioned by name. We had never met them. In some cases, they were very opaque, people that just, we have no sense of their inner lives. For me, that’s a direct invitation, because the question I’m always asking is, yeah, but OK, so what is it like to be on the inside of that mind?
So I just imagined onward and collected a bunch of material, which I then put in a drawer, actually still handwritten, chapters that I had written in 2012 and 2013. And then I returned to them in about 2016. The question was never whether I would keep thinking and writing about people in this world. The real question was, would I publish it as a book? Because my criteria were pretty high. I wanted to feel like it was about different things very strongly, even though these same structural principles applied. I wanted to feel like it was, at least by my own standards, as good or better, because I knew that if it weren’t, it would be perceived as much worse.
And it just needed to feel like it was really its own thing. That part was a question mark for quite a while. And it was only— I think it was the machine that helped me to see how it did all fit together into one story.
It’s interesting hearing you talk about it because it did strike me while reading it that it felt, while there are definitely characters who appeared in “Goon Squad” in it, it felt more as if the structure is what has migrated and been continued. And it’s almost a sequel in terms of the way you’re thinking and writing, more than a sequel because of its links to the previous book.
Completely. And the other thing is, sequel implies some kind of timeline, as does prequel. And one of the defining things about both of these books is that chronology is not an organizing principle. So calling it a sequel seems immediately like a misnomer. And, but you could also call it a prequel because there’s actually earlier material chronologically in “The Candy House” than in “Goon Squad.”
And in fact, the one family unit that I write about a fair amount in both books— and there’s really only one— in that context, we get the origin story of that family in “The Candy House.” So, to me, sequel and prequel just don’t apply because of the irrelevance of chronology to these books.
Yes, that seems appropriate. Both books thumb their nose at the idea of knowable chronology and perfect cause and effect. The other thing we should say, since you’re talking about structure and the inspiration for that, is that both books— and I find this striking especially compared to “Manhattan Beach,” which, as you suggested, had a very traditional feel to it— they not only hop around in time and use different characters’ voices and perspectives, but they actually have very innovative stylistic choices in each.
In “Goon Squad,” you very famously wrote a chapter in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. In “The Candy House,” there is a chapter where a spy is being given instructions that are these very brief directives given over and over again throughout the chapter. I’m wondering what it is about these books in particular that free you up to do that? And I guess, how much— is that fun? Is it scary? How do you feel when you’re first doing something like that?
I love doing it, for several reasons. One is that, first of all, looking back at the origins of the novel in the 17th, 18th century, to my mind, the novel was invented to be a hungry, greedy form that could pull into itself all other kinds of discourse. So in the earliest novels, graphic images, letters, legal documents. So, to me, it’s, as a fiction writer, one of the fun things about working with the novel is that anything is up for grabs. If I can bend it to fiction, I will. And I’m looking around me for those opportunities all the time.
It’s not easy to do it because the danger is that you just look like you’re using gimmickry. And what I find is that the only time any kind of radical structural form works is if I can find a story that can only be told that way. It involves a lot of waiting and a lot of trial and error, but the payoff for me is that if I can find a story that demands to be told in 140-character structural utterances, I’m going to be doing something I could never have done otherwise. So it ensures that I keep growing as a writer.
And so I love taking these chances and finding these moments where I can, in structure that seems not useful for fiction, like PowerPoint, for example, and actually use it. But it’s hard to sustain something like that over the course of a whole book, probably impossible in a lot of these cases.
So these books that are comprised of smaller units in which one of the defining features is that the units will feel different from each other is the perfect arena in which I can keep doing this. And it is really fun, but with the caveat that there is so much trial and error. There are things I still haven’t made work, but again, I think of that as, well, it’s still on the list. Let’s see if I can someday make it work.
Yeah, I didn’t miss you saying that you didn’t think it could work for a whole book, so we’ll see if that’s the challenges you set yourself in the future. I’m going to take you back. You mentioned the invention of the novel, but going a little bit somewhere between then and now, you did our By the Book interview a few years ago in the Book Review. And when the question was asked, What kinds of books bring you the most pleasure these days? you answered “19th-century novels.”
And you said: “I’m amazed by their capaciousness and flexibility, all the gutsy things that happen routinely in those books and today would be called experimental.” And it was funny seeing that because in Dwight Garner’s review of “The Candy House” in The Times, he wrote: “This is minimalist maximalism. It’s as if Egan compressed a big 19th-century triple-decker novel onto a flash drive.” And I’m just curious what you make of that line and whether you feel any truth in it and whether you’re still inspired by those books.
I mean, nothing could make me happier. I am always reading 19th-century fiction amidst everything else. In some ways, it was the great era of the novel, not because novels were necessarily better than they are now, but I think it was when novels had the most cultural power. There were just very few other forms of mass-produced entertainment, at least certainly before the end of the 19th century. I love to revisit that time. Also, I love serialization. And we, as a culture, love serialization, but we look to television for it now. And all of the things that we love about serialized TV are present in the 19th-century novel.
So, anyway, the bottom line is, nothing could have made me happier than reading those words. And one reason I like to keep reading 19th century amidst everything else is that I want to stay connected to that kind of storytelling with its flexibility, its capaciousness, its just— swagger, the willingness to do anything and the confidence to think that the public will buy it because I’m doing it. I don’t necessarily feel that way, but I like to be near that kind of sensibility.
Back to the cube, the machine that is the through line in “The Candy House,” honestly, I think what made me so happy to finally stumble on that idea was that it let me do anything. It was that feeling: This gives me license to do whatever I want— to go deep inside people’s minds, to let people see people they’ve seen just once in their lives, to let people go inside each other’s minds. All of these, it was just such a feeling of joy narratively that I could use this device, both narrative and mechanical, to let me do whatever I wanted, and that feeling of being able to do whatever one wants is what I get so much from 19th-century fiction.
It is interesting the way you describe the cube. It does make it sound like it turns everyone potentially into a great novelist. It gives them the tools to do that. I have to ask, because you’re in the prime of your career, and you did mention that at the time you were on book tour for “Goon Squad,” you were writing notes toward this book. I just wonder if, since this is so different from your other works and it gives you a lot of these freedoms, whether there might one day be a third book.
I would love to do it. I think that it potentially would be harder because at this point, the cast of characters is so diffuse that to draw another ring around it would, I think, land me in territory that would be very hard to make cohere. So I think in order to write another book in this world, I would probably have to focus on one area, which already would feel a little different from these two books. So I don’t know, but that’s the kind of worried macro thinking that I have to move away from to write fiction always. That’s just me ruminating.
The answer to your question in a concrete way is, I have people I’m still interested in who are either opaque, sometimes alienating, in “The Candy House,” people that I want to explore the interiors of. And I also have forms that I want to try. So all of those elements exist. And if I can find a way to fuse them and feel that openness and sense of possibility, I would never say no.
Well, I would hate to ask macro questions that keep you from doing the actual writing, so I’ll let you get back to work. The new novel again is “The Candy House,” a follow-up of whatever nature you want to describe it as to Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” Jennifer, thanks again for taking the time to talk about it.
It’s such a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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Alexandra Alter joins me now with news from the field. Hey, Alexandra.
Hey, John.
You wrote about an author recently in a piece that fascinated me, a Russian writer who I think is pretty timely right now. Who is he?
Yeah, so this author’s name is Vladimir Sorokin, and I’m embarrassed to say that I hadn’t read his work before I started working on this profile of him in preparation to interview him. He is one of the most acclaimed and controversial and inventive writers working in Russia today. And I’d planned to interview him when his book came out in translation this April. The book is called “Their Four Hearts,” and it’s being released by Dalkey Archive Press.
And this was back in December before the invasion of Ukraine. And it made a lot of his commentary on Russian history and politics, which he does in a very bizarre, oblique science fiction, satire way through his books, it made it very timely. And he’s also in a kind of precarious position himself as someone who has opposed the war and opposed Putin. He’s left for Berlin, where he plans to probably stay until things have settled down a bit.
And when you spoke to him, he was in Berlin. And what is his work through the years in terms of its stance toward the Russian government?
It’s such an interesting trajectory because as I looked back through what has been translated already, which is not much of his work— a ton is coming out now, which is also quite interesting. But as I talk to scholars and translators about Sorokin’s body of work, he really does trace Russia’s political history. He started out in the Soviet era as an underground dissident writer. His first novel, “The Queue,” was actually released in France. It didn’t come out in Russia until after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was released in France in the ‘80s.
And that was a real absurdist take on Soviet bureaucracy and oppression. The whole novel takes place in dialogue amongst people who are waiting in line to buy stuff. And they don’t even know what they’re waiting for. So it’s very much a commentary on what life was like in the Soviet Union. And then, after the Soviet Union collapsed, he went wild with freedom. And many of his books are about politics, but in very absurd, sort of satirical ways, so that I think that added a layer of protection a lot of the time, where he wasn’t directly criticizing people in power.
But in the ‘90s, he wrote these really over the top— some of them are extremely violent. One of them is “Their Four Hearts,” which I mentioned. It’s about these four archetypal Soviet heroes who are sent on this pointless mission that involves all kinds of violence and degradation and, really, some of the most grotesque things I’ve ever read. But his point in doing this was not just to shock, but to say, this is what life under the Soviet Union was like and the way that the government took control of people’s lives and language itself through propaganda. These are all things that he’s tackling in his work.
And then he went through this big sci-fi phase, which he continues to kind of write in this vein. He sets a lot of his work in the near future. But the Russia that he’s describing in the near future has devolved into a medieval tsarist state. So there’s the “Day of the Oprichnik,” which is probably his most overtly political book. It’s all about these henchmen of the tsar and it’s set in the future, but it’s all about the opulence and oppression and violence of tsarist Russia.
And one of his books that is coming out this year, also in translation for the first time, is “Telluria.” And that’s also set in a futuristic Russia/Europe that has devolved into these feudal medieval states. And it’s very funny. It’s very disturbing. It’s very fantastical. There’s centaurs and talking dogs and some things that I can’t describe on a family-friendly podcast, but I think it might be the perfect introduction to Sorokin because it’s also in 50 short chapters, and he adopts different linguistic styles.
In some cases, he’s writing in what his translator Max Lawton described to me as Old Church Slavonic. So Max kind of made it more like Chaucerian English. And in other cases, he’s writing in what sounds like more government dialogue, and then there’s these country folk who are talking in this slang. And you get to see his stylistic range and the wildness of his imagination. And there’s a lot of overt political references that he sneaks in as well.
And which book is that?
This is “Telluria,” and it’s being published this summer, I believe in August, by the New York Review of Books Classics.
OK, so that’s where you suggest starting. Did you get a sense when you were talking to him whether he felt disappointed or surprised or resigned or what combination of feelings about the fact that he’s now in exile and that Russia is in the place that it is, doing what it’s doing?
Yeah, he was very direct about it. Even before we spoke, he had published a piece in The Guardian, essentially calling Putin a monster. He’s not hiding his feelings, even though it’s a very dangerous moment for Russian dissidents to be speaking their minds. People have been arrested for saying similar things. And it happened to be a coincidence that he left for Berlin when he did, just three days before the war started. He and his wife have been spending time in Berlin since the ‘80s, and they have an apartment there.
And he did say, “I didn’t foresee this. I didn’t see this coming.” He compared the invasion to, I think the phrase he used was “killing your own mother.” He really sees it as just brutal and unnecessary.
But at the same time, even though he’s claiming not to be at all prophetic about this conflict, many people who have followed his career and his work point to certain things in his books and say Sorokin is one of the few contemporary Russian writers who has been a strong voice of opposition against Putin and has been screaming about the Russian state’s capacity for violence, the movement towards restoring bits of the lost empire, and what he calls this medieval mindset that he sees creeping into Russian government and society.
So even though he claims not to be a prophet, there are other scholars who point to elements in his work that would point you to some of the political tendencies that have become obvious to the world at this point.
So you’ve already mentioned several books. Part of the impetus for this piece even before the war was the fact that he’s becoming more widely translated in English these days.
Yes, that’s one of the really interesting and surprising things I learned when I was working on this, which is, as famous as he is in Russia and even in Europe, very little of his work had been previously translated into English, just a handful of books. And I think the reason is that they’re really tricky to translate and sometimes hard to stomach. There was resistance among English-language publishers.
But one of the reasons that what someone called the Sorokin-ssance is happening now is this translator, Max Lawton, who became obsessed with Sorokin when he was a graduate student, translated five of his books before he even had a contract from a publisher, and has now done two translations that are coming out next year and another six that are coming out over the next four years.
And one of the fascinating things about this emerging body of English-language translations of his work is that these are some of his most iconic and controversial books, the books that made him who he is that cemented his reputation as this irreverent iconoclast troublemaker in Russia. Some of the ones that are coming out include “Blue Lard,” which features a sex scene between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev and landed Sorokin with a charge of obscenity and distributing p*rnography, which was later dropped, and “The Norm,” which is one of his most over-the-top satires about Soviet oppression and propaganda. So those are all coming out in the next few years.
It sounds like he’s a writer where it’s hard to situate what’s over the top and what’s over, over the top.
Exactly, yeah.
I direct people online to read the full profile you wrote, which is terrific and where they’ll learn a lot more and also where there are several striking photos of him and of his artwork. He’s also a visual artist. Alexandra, thanks for being here to talk about it.
Thanks so much for having me. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Two of The Times’s staff book critics join me now to talk about things they recently reviewed— Alexandra Jacobs and Molly Young. Hey, guys.
Hi.
Hi, John.
Alexandra, let’s start with you. What did you review?
I reviewed Tina Brown’s hotly anticipated book about the royals, “The Palace Papers.”
And this is her second book on the royals, no?
Well, her first book on the royals— and I should be clear I mean the British royals since I know there are royals in other parts of the world, obviously. Her first book was “The Diana Chronicles,” which I also reviewed back in ancient times at The New York Observer.
And that was, more or less, a biography. What is the structure of this one? What’s she trying to do in it?
This one is an account of how the monarchy has both lost its grip in a way and also regripped, I guess you could say. It’s about how the monarchy has reshaped itself for the 21st century. Fans of “The Crown” will remember when Princess Margaret was not allowed to marry Captain Townsend. And it shows how far the monarchy has come in terms of permitting modern configurations and reconfigurations, which it’s really had to do to adapt and to survive. So it’s a sprawling book.
And because it’s Tina Brown, there’s a lot, because of who she is— which is an editor of many publications that have covered the royals, as well as being a person who has personal interest in the royals— there’s a lot of personal accounts of her time covering them and thinking about them, which is enjoyable.
Is there a lot of gossip?
There is a lot of gossip, John.
But are there things you— I don’t know how close a royal watcher you are. I am not.
I’m not really— I love “The Crown,” and I love reading about the monarchy during World War II and after World War II. And I’m much more familiar with that period. I’m not a modern royal fanatic. But this book does a very nice job of linking the two periods and showing the continuity between things that Princess Margaret suffered and now that Prince Harry is suffering.
You’re not going to try to convince me that you didn’t watch Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah, are you?
I actually only watched that interview after I read this book. And Tina Brown does a glorious job of recapping it. I think fans of Meghan Markle may not be so pleased with her treatment. Interestingly, she compares Kate Middleton to a heroine out of Trollope, Anthony Trollope. And Meghan Markle gets the shorter shrift. She says that Meghan Markle is like something out of the back pages of Variety Magazine, which I thought was a diss. I thought maybe we could come up with a better literary metaphor for Meghan Markle, but no.
We’re going to move from the royals to a slightly less elevated figure, but an equally famous one, I think. Molly, we’re going to break a soft rule, and we’re going to talk about a review that’s not going to be online until next week. You reviewed John Waters’s first novel this week. Tell us a little bit about that.
Yes, first of all, how dare you imply that he’s not some kind of royalty. John Waters is a filmmaker and an artist and a writer, and came up in the ‘70s with a bunch of trashy, wild films, like “Pink Flamingos” and “Female Trouble.” And these are films where I can’t even hint at the premise without rendering this podcast unairable. But he then hit mainstream success jackpot with “Hairspray,” which came out in 1988 and became a Broadway musical and won him a broader kind of fame.
Anyway, so in the past decade, he’s moved away from film, and he’s been doing more performing and writing and publishing books of essays. And “Liarmouth” is his first novel, although it’s very much— even though it’s a new form for him, it very much fits into the John Waters aesthetic tradition.
How does it feel plot wise and style wise compared to, say, his early films? Does it have that same kind of gonzo attitude?
Yeah, it really does. And his films are like— he’s like cilantro, right, where you either love him, or he fills your mouth with a bad taste and you never want to taste him again. And I came upon his films pretty young, like disturbingly young, because at the local Blockbuster where I was allowed to pick out a video cassette that was rated G or PG but no higher, his videos, for some reason, I think they were not rated. There wasn’t an NC-17 rating at the time. So for some reason, I was able to slip them past my parents. And I watched “Pink Flamingos” when I was like 12 years old, which probably explains a lot.
But he is obsessed with kink and with various subcultures and with bad behavior and bad taste and criminal inclinations. And in “Liarmouth,” it tells the story of a woman named Marsha Sprinkle, who’s a kind of chaos-agent vixen who goes on a crime spree that goes awry. And, dot, dot, dot, you won’t believe what happens next.
It seems like the book has, from your review, that the book has three generations of women in the same family who may want to kill each other. Is that fair to say?
Yeah, it’s a complicated relationship that these three women have. There’s Adora, who is the matriarch, the grandmother, the originator. She makes her living performing plastic surgery on pets in the Upper East Side of New York, which is a very John Waters profession. She gives leg extensions to dachshunds and Botox to poodles and so forth. And then Marsha, her daughter, is the kleptomaniac.
And then Poppy, who’s Marsha’s daughter, runs a trampoline fun park, where she and her gang of adult trampoline addicts bounce to their hearts’ content. And they all have wronged each other in some way and are intent on reuniting and getting retribution, which happens in Provincetown, Cape Cod, of all places.
I take it back. This is just like the royals. And so how unairable is this novel? Is it easy to quote from in your review, or does it have the Waters trademarks?
Actually, this one, I would say, I would give it an R rating, as opposed to NC-17 or X. There’s a lot of scatology, and there’s some fun fetish material and the kind of classic John Waters interests. But it’s definitely more palatable than maybe his films from the ‘70s, although I recommend those, too.
OK, so somewhat more family-friendly, except if you give it an R, then the Molly’s parents of today will notice that and won’t let her read it. But that’s OK. She’ll find something else.
Or she’ll find a way to read it.
Good point. Thank you both so much for being here.
Thanks, John.
Great to be here.
Remember, there’s more at nytimes.com/books. And you can always write to us at books@nytimes.com. The Book Review Podcast is produced by the great Pedro Rosado from HeadStepper Media. Thanks for listening. For The New York Times, I’m John Williams.
