AO: Yeah, now I'm planning to use a totally different structure. I realized that if I actually tried to write it as a hard-boiled detective novel, I was just going to write a bad genre book with literary pretensions -- the worst of both worlds. I needed to come up with a more ambitious structure that announces itself differently to you from the start. So I'm playing with the idea of setting it in multiple times and places, making it more like a jigsaw puzzle than a linear narrative. I'm really excited about that. I don't know how it'll pan out, but I'm excited and I really want to be writing it. That's the hardest part, I think, is finding ways to keep going and not give up on the thing.
AC: Will the jumps in time be something like the jumps you've done in the stories, or will they be more dramatic?
AO: It'll be more dramatic. There'll be different chapters that move back and forth. It will take the reading of the entire book to really understand both the different characters, and also the meaning of specific plot events, so that the mystery is revealed through the process of reading.
AC: It sounds more ambitious than your last novel.
AO: I think we talked about that recently, about my reading of things like "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell and how impressed I was with the originality of his whole structure. That's really inspired me to change up my own ideas of what a novel can be.
AC: Like the Lydia Millet book ["Oh Pure and Radiant Heart"]?
AO: Exactly. Right. Oppenheimer wakes up in the present day and just starts walking around. I love that Millet just declares that this is the premise and you either accept it or you don't. It is not realist, and you just go with it. Millet and a lot of writers I admire solve certain problems just through bravado, just by declaring this is what the book is. The reader either subscribes to it or he doesn't. With a really good book you don't read the entire book saying, "I don't buy it." You trust the authority of the writer.
AC: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
AO: I was one of those annoying kids squirreled away in the basement writing little things. I remember writing out some story and putting it in construction paper covers and binding it with ribbon and giving it to my parents. I don't know where I got the idea that it would be such a great thing to be, but it was the only thing I ever seriously considered. I was lucky enough to have parents who thought it was a perfectly legitimate thing to want to do with your life. Not everyone is lucky enough to have that kind of family.
The only time I deviated from that was in college. I decided it wasn't practical and it seemed too dreamy a thing to want to do, which of course it is. It took me a while to admit that I did want to do this very foolish thing.
AC: And it all worked out.
AO: Thank God. It was touch and go there for a while.
AC: The New Mexico years?
AO: Yes, they were dark, dark times. [laughing] I was talking to my editor about this today. I want to take a lot more time with this next book. With my first book, I felt that I was getting older and that if I hadn't really become a writer, in terms of being published by a certain age, then I wasn't anything, or that I should give up and go to law school. It made me more stressed out than I should have been. I should have just been stressed out over writing a good book and not over all the other circumstances surrounding it. So with this book I'm trying not to think about the marketplace or being better known, and just focus on the ambitions of the book itself. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. It's not the end of the world.
AC: Do you have any final advice for writers just starting out?
AO: I would give the same advice that everyone else does: read a lot and write a lot. I think sometimes people don't read enough, or widely enough. They're more interested in thinking of themselves as writers than in being part of the bigger conversation.
AC: You've mentioned this idea of a conversation before, with the reviewer, or in teaching a class on review culture.
AO: I think reviewing is part of the conversation, but in a larger sense I think of the conversation as being book to book. Like how we talked about Anne of Green Gables, how much we loved those books when we were young. Or "Jane Eyre," or how I fell in love with my first Don DeLillo book, or Alice Munro, and you can see these things coming out in my work -- which I wouldn't compare with theirs -- but which is a conversation with theirs. Maybe someone will read my book and write back to it. To me, that's the most exciting part.
