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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/now-everything-world-going-rethought-conversation-ann-beattie/"></div>A Wonderful Stroke of Luck, Ann Beattie’s 21st book, is the work of a master storyteller at the height of her talents. In it, a young man named Ben attempts to make sense of his life in the years after 9/11 and after graduating from the prestigious Bailey Academy, a boarding school in New Hampshire. It’s a remarkable novel that feels so utterly real that it defies convention. It works the way life works, which is to say with misdirection and events that feel random but probably aren’t. It calls to mind, in different ways, both Stoner and The Secret History — which are, incidentally, two of my all-time favorite novels. Ben is particularly haunted by his former teacher, the monstrous Pierre LaVerdere, but the less I write about that relationship here the better.
 As a longtime admirer of Beattie’s fiction, I did my best not to completely geek out when we happened to share an airport shuttle a few years ago at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee. By that, I mean I completely geeked out. She was far kinder than she needed to be and we’ve stayed in contact. In February, she answered a few questions for me via email from her winter home in Key West, Florida. We discussed, among other things, the new novel, her secret talent for cooking, and the worst writing advice in the world.
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ANDREW ERVIN: How did this novel originate? In particular, can you pinpoint how a character as original as LaVerdere comes to fruition?
ANN BEATTIE: I never create characters based exactly on people I know, though I’m familiar with his type from being in the academic world and hearing so many professors take a sardonic tone and/or pretend to have every answer that’s ultimately warped to their own preening purposes. It was as if he just emerged, named, and began to evolve faster than I could keep up with him. In revising the book, I added scenes in which the reader could see him functioning as The Teacher, but by then I was more than a little wary of him, myself. Even in my early draft, when he was less directly involved in the students’ daily lives, he immediately had a distinct personality. I didn’t know what he’d do, but his proclivity toward creating a version of chaos, masked as something else, was always apparent to me. As writers know, troublesome and troubled characters are appreciated, because they help to get things rolling.
As the book proceeds, LaVerdere gets more dangerous and isn’t only some rather imperious, sardonic provocateur. At least, though, I wouldn’t want to say those things that directly for attribution (then people think that’s only and all I intended). I made him less merely troubled and more troublesome — to himself as well as the other characters.
A Wonderful Stroke of Luck is your 21st book, which is astounding to me. What new challenges did you present yourself in writing this one? 
Every book presents its own set of problems. When I started writing, I had only a vague idea of writing about someone at a place like Bailey, so I wasn’t challenging myself, or not challenging myself. Novels are exhausting, as we all know, though if that’s what a manuscript turns into, that’s what happens. I don’t plan novels out, so I don’t really think of new challenges, as small things inevitably trip you up and large things can work more easily than you’d expect (at least, in retrospect, when the first draft is done).
I will say that initially there were no chapters. I mean, no numbered chapters. It was hard to persuade me they should be there, but I caved. I think, though, that my initial feeling about the material was that it was all on a roll — it started rather quietly at Bailey, then gathered its own quick momentum, so I just kept going in a stream. I did find that when I was numbering, it made sense to drop some things and also merge two chapters, for instance — so ultimately, I suppose numbering was a good idea, to make the book tighter. The hardest thing to write was the last chapter. By then, I knew generally what it would be, but having just the right amount of dialogue between them, and not too much, was hard to do.
I love the title, which derives from a quote by the Dalai Lama. Can you tell me a little bit about how you arrived at it?
I couldn’t come up with a title. One working title emphasized LaVerdere, but it’s not his book —  though that man might run away with anything — so that was counter-productive. Other things sounded good, but not as titles — they were too directive. So, on my birthday, still fretting, my husband took me to dinner and somehow we started thinking about the Dalai Lama. And, yes, this was before drinks. Lincoln pulled out his phone (no, that’s not a usual dinnertime routine) and started scrolling through statements the Dalai Lama had made. We both lit up when we came to “a wonderful stroke of luck,” because it seemed that what the characters wanted in my novel — the yearning that was sometimes not articulated, or the way it was hard for some of the characters to connect, or even to be sure of what they really desired — was just right. Yet, since he’s the Dalai Lama, the statement also had a particular resonance.
What’s your secret talent that few people know about?
Like everybody else, I’m a good cook. Last summer, with simple ingredients that would have allowed me to make dinner in ten minutes, I went so far as to make lemon verbena tea with leaves from the huge plant in the garden (first thing I plant, every year), then steamed scallops over the liquid. There’s no better way to avoid writing than cooking.
Got a favorite recipe?
8 small white potatoes cooked in the skin, equal amount peeled, cooked sweet potatoes, put in blender with white pepper (1/2 tsp?), dried thyme, fresh rosemary, and half a box of Swanson&#8217;s unsalted chicken broth. Cook on low. Then dump in leeks and fennel sautéed in good olive oil and 1/2 cup sake. Pour in the rest of the chicken broth before removing from heat. Cook that, grind pink peppercorns over it, and offer a little pitcher of medium cream, if anyone wants to stir that in.
Who’s the American author you wish more people would read?
Peter Taylor. I was lucky enough to know Peter, and he had — and has — many fans, but he still isn’t well known out of the South. Library of America published his collected stories a couple of years ago, and I wrote the intro. I’d start with The Old Forest.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? And the worst?
Best (about the manuscript of my first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter), from my friend David Wiegand, a great editor: “I took out the first forty-nine and a half pages, so you begin with this sentence, halfway down page 49. See?”
Worst writing advice: “You have to write every day.”
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Now Everything in the World Was Going to Be Rethought: A Conversation with Ann Beattie

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/conversation-kate-christensen/"></div>Kate Christensen’s harrowing new novel, The Last Cruise, follows three characters, each more compelling than the previous, as they find themselves adrift in a sea of trouble. Mick is a Hungarian chef working in the bowels of a less-than-luxurious ocean liner making its way from California to Hawaii. Miriam is a violinist in the aging string quartet hired to entertain the passengers, which includes Christine, a farmer from Maine in need of a change. It’s the perfect set up for a tragedy of errors on the high seas.
 While it’s not entirely correct to say that Christensen’s career has flown under the radar, she has not had the breakout public attention she so clearly deserves. There’s not a better American novelist at work today, by my estimation. To date, she’s written seven novels and two foodie memoirs and might be best known for The Great Man, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award. 
 Every sentence in The Last Cruise lands with authority and poise. The solidity of plot and of character in Christensen’s novels — in The Epicure’s Lament and Trouble in particular — remind me a great deal of Robert Stone’s fiction. I’d be hard pressed to find a higher compliment. Hoping to bring more readers aboard her impressive oeuvre, I reached out to Christensen for an interview. I might have twisted her arm ever so gently and we exchanged emails in early July to discuss contemporary classical music, female friendship, and truly awful vacations. 
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 ANDREW ERVIN: How did this story begin? Which of these three characters came to you first? 
KATE CHRISTENSEN: The idea for this book came out of obsession, as all my books seem to —obsession in this case with news stories about cruises going awry, which started popping up with alarming regularity a number of years ago. It suddenly seemed that every week or so I read something about a nasty ship-wide norovirus outbreak on the high seas, or an engine room fire knocking out power and stranding a ship for five days off the coast of Mexico with no refrigeration or air conditioning or plumbing. It all sounded like a total nightmare. I already had an inexplicable phobia of cruises — I’ve never been on one — so these stories both vindicated and amped up my fear. I began to realize that this might be a good premise for a novel. All three of my main characters presented themselves more or less simultaneously as soon as I started mulling over the best way to tell this story. I wanted access to all parts of the boat, so I needed a passenger, an entertainment crew member, and a below decks worker. And there were Christine, Miriam, and Mick, arising pretty much fully formed in my imagination.
The Last Cruise doesn’t strike me as overtly political in any way and yet the idea of a group of adrift passengers clinging to a slowly sinking ship, abandoned by its billionaire owner, feels timely somehow, doesn’t it?
If it does, I’m glad. It felt timely to me when I was writing the book, which was during the year and a half leading up to the 2016 presidential election. I wanted to embody the foreboding I felt, the sense that the center was coming apart in a whole terrifying new way, that our creaky, old democracy was now an entrenched, systemically sanctioned corporatocracy. Seven years ago, I moved to Portland, Maine, which happens to be a stop on the cruise ship route up the Eastern seaboard. Often, as my husband and I walk our dog on the edge of the peninsula the city is built on, we see enormous, hulking cruise ships in port, so grotesquely vast they almost dwarf the city itself. Each one disgorges hundreds of passengers into the narrow cobblestoned streets of the Old Port, throngs of consumers buying souvenirs and food and t-shirts, injecting the local economy with an infusion of money, and then they all get back onto the mothership and lumber off to the next port of call, trailed by a squad of squawking seagulls.
Every time a supership comes to town, it’s a little surreal, like the invasion of a strange, soft, rapacious capitalist army in cargo shorts and white jeans. During our first years in Maine, I became perversely fascinated with the entire pageant as it repeated itself throughout the cruising season: hulking white behemoth filling the harbor, gulping fuel and discharging exhaust, a mobile mega-hotel bigger and taller than our biggest and tallest building, its population suddenly glutting the town, then just as suddenly — gone. Aha, I thought one day: a metaphor. Or maybe I meant microcosm, or both.
Can you tell me about some of the reading you did for the sake of this novel? And was there specific music that inspired your depiction of Miriam and her string quartet, Sabra? I thought of Gorecki and Ligeti.
Ezra Laderman’s Six-Day War-inspired piece, “A Single Voice,” is possibly the closest musical relative to Rivka Weiss’s “Six-Day War Quartet,” but it’s really too beautiful and emotionally straightforward and unpretentious to be compared to what the members of the Sabra darkly dub “the Weiss.” I essentially created both composer and quartet out of whole cloth, as well as the Sabra Quartet itself. But yes, in terms of the atonality and dissonance of Weiss&#8217;s music, Gorecki and Ligeti are not far off the mark.
For behind-the-scenes cruise ship research, I read a couple of interesting books: Devils on the Deep Blue Sea by Kristoffer A. Garin, a history and exposé of the industry itself: its robber barons with their dodgy capitalist rule-breaking and kitschy vision of floating pleasure palaces. I also read Cruise Confidential: A Hit Below the Waterline by Brian David Bruns, which is the memoir of one of the only Americans ever to have worked in a below decks crew. It’s a funny, fun book, but it’s also a frank exposé of the working conditions faced by these mostly-young workers from all over the world.
I also read blogs by frequent cruisers and binge-watched YouTube videos of cruise ships in storms — most of them shot by passengers.
You have a remarkable talent for depicting friendship in your novels, the lasting joys and temporary tensions, especially among women. Christine and Valerie here provide a perfect example, and Josie and Raquel in Trouble also come to mind. Is that a point of emphasis while writing? How do you do it?
Thank you! In my experience, female friendship is an intense and singular beast. Each one is different, but my close friendships with other women have always run very deep and, in many cases, they’ve lasted for decades — I have several female friends I’ve been close to for something like 30 years (Jesus, time flies). And in the course of these long, enduring friendships, I’ve learned (often the hard way) that what makes a friendship last is a mutual willingness and ability to withstand tension, to roll with differences, and to come back together without resentment or guilt after times of distance since friendships go through phases the way marriages do. And like marriages, the more flexible and adaptive both people are, the more durable and long-lived the friendship.
I’ve had friendships end with both bangs and whimpers, and it’s always shockingly painful to lose a friend, even when my primary feeling is relief, which it has been at times. And as a writer, I tend to use everything that happens to me emotionally in my work, so the fact that I’m so deeply entangled with and invested in and committed to my own close female friendships somehow translates into a love of writing about fictional ones. I love exploring the ways in which women can love each other so passionately and fully, but without sexual or physical intimacy, and without binding vows, expectations of exclusivity, or demands beyond what’s offered freely. It’s complex and wonderful when it works, in both life and fiction.
What’s the worst vacation you’ve ever been on?
If happy vacations are all alike, maybe bad ones are bad in their own ways. I’m torn between two totally different ones: the five days I spent in New Orleans during the lead-up to Mardi Gras, when I got an infected cornea in one eye and had to lie in a dark room in acute pain, moaning, while second-line parades went by outside, Dixieland bands playing and drunk euphoric people throwing beads; or the time I went to an artists’ residency in Southern Germany. Does that count as a vacation? Okay, then I’ll pick the residency, if only because I travel on my stomach, and that was one of the worst food experiences of my life.
Eight years ago, 30 or more artists of various disciplines turned up in the Bodensee, including my now-husband, Brendan, and me. We came from the US, Europe, and Australia with happy visions of writing and painting and playing music in romantic high-ceilinged rooms, sleeping in grand carved mahogany beds with brocade canopies, and dressing for candlelit, beautiful, lavish, wine-soaked dinners in a medieval hall (at least I did). The promised medieval castle wasn’t a castle at all, but an ascetic monastery turned boarding school. So we slept in modern dorms in small kiddie bunk beds, shared the communal bare-bones bathroom with all the other artists on our hallway, and ate three meals a day crammed on benches at long institutional tables in a small side room of the school cafeteria, with no wine served. The head organizer of this residency, as it turned out, embezzled most of the money they’d raised and absconded with it, so we weren’t reimbursed for our travel. They also had not bothered to arrange for any workrooms or materials for anyone, so we all had to scramble to get any work done while we were there.
But the meals, for me, were the worst part. We had half an hour, three times a day for each meal: generally, on regular days, 8-8:30 for breakfast, 12:30-1 for lunch, and 6-6:30 for dinner. If you were late, you were out of luck, and you had to go and buy your supper at the former jail turned tavern across the grounds. Everyone complained about the food, which wasn’t surprising, since this was, after all, a boarding school, and a German one to boot. But even worse than the heavy, doughy, bland food was the atmosphere we ate in. The kitchen staff hated us. They yelled at us constantly. The people in charge regularly forgot to tell the cooks that we were missing lunch because of a field trip (showing the entrapped artists the wonders of the Bodensee in various vans was a large part of their agenda), forgot to tell the kitchen staff that we’d planned a bonfire cookout dinner so we wouldn’t be eating in the cafeteria, forgot to tell us that Sunday brunch had moved later, forgot to tell us that dinner would be earlier. There was a constant state of war between artists and cooks: when we showed up at a meal we weren’t expected for, they spat at us in German. When we showed up at a meal having failed to notify them that we wouldn’t be at the one prior, they screamed and threatened not to feed us. We all felt like bad children constantly, through no fault of our own — I have never been yelled at as much as I was during those three weeks.
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There Was No Up or Down: A Conversation with Kate Christensen

Andrew Ervin is the author of the novella collection Extraordinary Renditions and the novel Burning Down George Orwell’s House. His most recent book is Bit By Bit: How Video Games Transformed Our World.

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Photo of Andrew Ervin by Angelica Bautista&nbsp;&nbsp;
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