T A B L E+T A L K What recent books will be future classics? Make your picks in the Books area of Table Talk A L S O+T O D A Y The Salon Interview: Dorothy Allison (03/31/98) R E C E N T L Y Nadine Gordimer By Dwight Garner (03/09/98) P.D. James By Jennifer Reese (02/26/98) Stanley Crouch By Jonathan Broder (02/25/98) Martin Amis By Laura Miller (02/10/98) Toni Morrison By Zia Jaffrey (02/02/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE R E V I E W S The Short History of a Prince By Jane Hamilton A meditative novel, set in Wisconsin, about a former ballet dancer trying to come to terms with his new life (03/31/98)		IAN MCEWAN | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Does music inform your writing? Only insofar as listening to music helps set the mind free. Into daydream, into realms of unrestrained thought. But no, I find music a distraction a bit at the point of creation. It's often hard to recapture the pleasure in music that I had when I was 17. I'm always looking for it again. I feel as if it were a garden, a poor old garden somewhere. Are you talking about rock 'n' roll? Not only rock 'n' roll. Classical music too. It could thrill me and overwhelm me in ways that I can only remember -- there was a sense of awe. It seemed to lift me literally off the ground. Now I just take pleasure in it. It doesn't make me ecstatic anymore, and I guess that's just sort of sad. Does the world of rock music mean anything to you now? My 11-year-old son is learning to play the guitar, so to help him and encourage him I've been learning too. It's suddenly touching an old groove. I've gotten to become horribly familiar with the work of Oasis and Verve. I hear things. The trouble is, to someone my age, everything sounds like a version of something I've heard before. I don't stay current. I bought the latest Blues Traveler because I'd heard it once when I was skiing and thought it was great skiing music. I liked it, and I think the harmonica is extraordinary. But again it all just sounds like a kind of mishmash of Led Zeppelin and several other things. It never gives me any real pleasure, so I scurry back to keyboard music of Bach, things like that. And I wonder a lot about tonality and how we can live without it. I increasingly think that we can't. I've read that when you began writing, you were reacting negatively to what you perceived as a certain literary climate in the U.K. ... The published writers then seemed a sort of postwar generation -- Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson -- the latter I came to know and respect enormously. They showed me a world that seemed to be too tied to a form of social documentary. Too concerned with those things that the English novel has often done well -- the nuances of class, the perils and attractions of social mobility, the furniture well-described. I think I was trying to make a strength out of my ignorance. I didn't know that world. I was a very déclassé sort of young man. I'd been tucked away in a country boarding school where most of the boys were from a working-class background in central London, but the idea was to give them the kind of education that wealthier kids would have had. I was there because there was a small intake of army brat kids ... Which you were. Which is what I was. Both my parents were from working-class backgrounds. Paradoxically, reading Kafka was a liberation despite the claustrophobic quality, the sense of entrapment that many of us feel we're in. I loved the sense of this disembodiment -- it could be anywhere at anytime and in there I saw a possibility for me. And then I suppose I just indulged myself in fantastic imaginings 'cause I wanted fiction to be bright. It drew not from autobiography so much as a sort of willed extravagance. Did you look to some American writers for inspiration? Reading Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" seemed to offer amazing life -- brilliant use of embarrassment, in terms of paralyzing the reader. For an American writer such as Roth to address something so commonplace as masturbation, and wrapped around it is an extraordinary meditation of what Jewishness is about. It was bold and profoundly apt. I took something from that. And "Naked Lunch" -- something in the kind of scamperous cruelty of it, again was like a jolt. So I guess I did want a kind of garishness. And I thought that since I was writing short stories, which offer a kind of laboratory -- they really were my training grounds. Did you detect a difference in how American writers dealt with class? They dealt with poverty. Class didn't seem such a crippling concern. Does America feel to you, now, as class-obsessed as Britain? Well, the realities of class are there because the realities of possession, of poverty, are quite self-evident. But it doesn't grip the American mind in the same way as it does the British. Its badges, its signals are not so clear. I can't easily tell an educated American from someone less schooled at age 14 simply by the way they speak. You once called fiction "a higher level of gossip." What did you mean by that? Well, I'm thinking really of the social novel. And I think of gossip in high terms. I do think -- just coming back to what I was saying about anthropology -- one of the things you'll find in all humans is that people stand around and talk about each other and judge each other and take great delight in examining their motives. It is perennially fascinating. I don't think it's a low thing. I think it's human. We identify ourselves by it, our groupings, and we bring to bear all that emotional intelligence, talking about someone's motives or how they crossed the line of acceptability or how they didn't pull themselves back from disaster. Novels, in a focused and more articulate way, do many of the same things. So it's not to denigrate either the novel or gossip, both are vital methods. Speaking of gossip, are you surprised by the media's interest in the private lives of writers -- particularly in the U.K.? It's gone out of hand lately. I have all sorts of theories about it. One is that people are putting too much into journalism and not enough into writing fiction. That the gossip that they should be putting into comic novels is actually appearing in columns in the newspaper. The generation younger than ours, guys in their 30s, should be writing novels. Don't we have enough novelists? There are way too many. But I think there are far too many gossip columnists. I don't know. I can't conceive of how the average reader of a newspaper could care about the comings and goings of a London novelist. I don't like it when I'm the object of it. It's very intrusive. It's generally extremely nasty. It's always slanted in some way to make you look unpleasant as possible. How have things changed under Tony Blair? Is the climate different for artists, writers, intellectuals? The gestation time for art is long so -- it's too soon for anything to have happened of that nature. Blair's honeymoon period is, as they keep saying, over, but it was very long. Memories are short, so I think we seem to forget how appalling the government was. On the whole, that this is the least bad government we've had in my adult life. There are some very serious projects under way -- the constitution, and we're about to get the Freedom of Information Act which will soon exceed yours. I'm impressed by both these things; they do devolve power outlets from the government. On the downside it really does seem to be a highly centralized decision-making machine. Britain is a far more governmental place than America could ever be -- it's highly centralized. So there is always a problem with what one former judge called "an elected dictatorship," and it is so keen to push it's project through that it's very intolerant of dissent. My hope is that it will relax a bit, and allow that dissent. I think Blair's heart is in the right place. He's popular still. He's got some very able people in his government. And I think the constitution project might be his making, to modernize the democracy itself. We're also, like you, in a boom cycle, which makes it a lot easier. The rest of Europe is in bad shape -- rising unemployment, rising inflation. I have one last question. It's about an image from "Enduring Love" that really haunted me -- the story you tell about the football players who die in a blizzard. Is that something that actually happened? I was in Toronto last week and a Canadian said to me, "I really like the novel but I really think it's down on Canadians." I said, "What could you mean by that? I've never even written about them. Oh, the football players!" Well, it was in the London Times. The Queen was visiting in Canada -- this was 1995 -- and she was going to visit a place called Yellow Night in the Northwest Territories. They gave her a bit of background information that said rather unfairly: "In this vast territory there are only 57,000 people, most of them hoodlums." Come on! Not worthy of the newspaper of record. And I thought, well, a third of them are children, surely. But it did say that a blizzard enveloped a football soccer game, and both teams and the referee couldn't, in the white-out, find their way to the edge of the pitch, and all of them died. I can't believe it. Well, it was in the paper. SALON | March 31, 1998