AO: My editor actually had me write an entire other draft of the book because he felt there were some psychological issues with the main character. Before even editing he said you've got to do some work, and he gave me some pretty stringent notes that it took me a long time to work through. After that he also did some rigorous line editing that really cranked up the book and changed it, I think, for the better. I'm lucky in that I have this editor who's known for really, really editing, and people say that that's now quite rare in New York.
AC: So the changes he suggested had more to do with character than plot.
AO: There were some changes to the plot, and some to do with the eco-warriors and how I portrayed them, but mostly they had to do with the overall psychological orientation of the main character. He felt that she needed to be more self-aware in the ways that she was behaving. It wasn't the sort of thing that he could fix line by line. I had to go through and make this change throughout. It was a lot of work, but I think it was worth it.
AC: Did you learn some things from writing the first book that you'll be able to put into use in the second?
AO: When we were in school, I took a class with Denis Johnson. I went to him and I asked him for general tips on how to write a novel. He said you never learn anything from writing a novel because whatever you learn in one is not going to help you with the subsequent one -- you're just going to have new and different problems. The main thing I learned is that I'm actually able to do it. Before it seemed like an almost insurmountable project. I'd never written anything that long. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to make it cohere, and I'm still dissatisfied with how my novel coheres or does not cohere, but I feel I'm capable of writing one book, and maybe I can do it again.
AC: We’ve talked in the past about reviews of your book and you mentioned that one review, by a writer for Christianity Today, had been very helpful.
AO: That was a very interesting review. She complained about the fact that in the novel all the plotlines don't come together in the end. My first reaction was that that's what makes it a literary book as opposed to a genre mystery. I'd had certain models in my mind when writing the book, like "Resuscitation of a Hanged Man" by Denis Johnson where you think that everything is going to lead to a specific kind of knowledge for the main character, and ultimately the discovery is that the quest for that knowledge is in itself flawed. That's what I was trying to do in my book, and she said that that's unsatisfying, that we look to art for the sense of fulfillment and closure and resolution that's lacking in real life. I wanted to defend myself from that, but I also understood what she was saying. But that was a great moment of feeling that we were having a dialogue about the book. She wasn’t doing it to put my book down; she wanted to dissect this issue.
AC: Is there a solution that would have answered her concerns?
AO: I think there are books that manage to do both a little bit better than my book did. Another model I had in mind was the Ishiguro book “When We Were Orphans,” but there are lots of literary books with mysteries embedded in them. I think that my book could have been more brazenly set up in the beginning so as not to create expectations. But then I also think that that was the whole point of my book. There was a mystery about the character’s parents, and you can never solve the mystery of your parents because you’ll never know them as people -- you’ll only know them from the perspective of your family. In some ways they are always unreachable to you.
AC: And with your second novel you're playing with the hard-boiled detective novel.
AO: I'm really interested in the genre, but I don't actually have the skills to work well with it. I enjoy reading mystery fiction and am drawn into the satisfactions of the narrative, the way that people can mastermind suspense and discovery and the planting of the clues and the payoff in the end. I myself am actually really bad at that, so I don't know why I keep trying to do it, except those books are so fun to read. And maybe there is the hope that you'll get better by attempting something you're not good at.
