The Limits of Fact and Explanation: A Conversation with Suzanne Berne

May 24, 2023

by Renee H. Shea

Renee H. Shea: In your essay “Why Write a Novel, Why Read a Novel, and Why Now?” you say that “writing a novel is often a long, crude, insecure business with a dubious outcome.” Yet, even seven years since your last book, apparently you still can’t resist. Why is that?

Suzanne Berne: For me, writing a novel is all about company. I find that having a long project is just that—company to come back to every day. Creating a bunch of characters who have a bunch of problems is a sort of engagement that I haven’t been able to find in any other way—or I would have because it does take so long! But I never stopped being interested in the process of this particular book, especially of figuring out the form and characters. I wanted the characters not just to have different perspectives on life but to actually sound different, to capture their different ways of thinking. That stayed fascinating to me.

Shea: The Blue Window is your fifth novel. Was there something new that drew you into writing this one, or are there questions you continue to explore throughout your fiction? Was there something about this time—the pandemic—that added urgency?

Berne: I started this book well before the pandemic, so the characters’ isolation, while it dovetailed with the pandemic, did not begin as a response to that, although I’ve had people tell me they feel like those characters stuck in that remote cottage echoed the feeling of loneliness during the pandemic. I saw this novel as another turn on some of the issues I looked at in The Dogs of Littlefield, which I thought of as a social comedy about menace. Characters felt great anxiety about the outside world and what they saw as global destabilization coming to their own small village. This new novel is connected to that because, at least in my mind, Lorna and Adam live in Littlefield. But this novel is also about anxiety. The Dogs of Littlefield was written during the Obama administration, and much of The Blue Window was written during the Trump era, so different kinds of anxiety stem from the larger political and cultural forces acting on the characters.

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Suzanne Berne won the 1997 Orange Prize for Fiction with her debut, A Crime in the Neighborhood, the shocking story of a young boy’s molestation and murder in a Washington suburb in the 1970s. With her latest novel, The Dogs of Littlefield, she’s back in the suburbs again, this time in Massachusetts. A poised study of contemporary middle-class discontent, the novel is a welcome addition to the ever-expanding genre of the American domestic novel. I begin by asking what attracts her (and so many contemporary writers) to such themes.

“Perhaps so many contemporary American writers write about modern middle-class families because a lot of us belong to that group ourselves and we’re immersed in its complexities and contradictions. Novelists also like to focus on characters who are at risk in some way, and I’d say right now the modern, middle-class American family seems quite at risk. Especially when it comes to aspirations. It used to seem reasonable, for instance, to hope for something more than whatever you had, whether it was a better job or a better neighbourhood or a nice retirement village on a golf course in Florida – or at least to hope your children could attain those things. But these days ‘something more’ seems increasingly out of reach. The bewilderment and disequilibrium that has accompanied this shift is very compelling.”

The suburban setting is a key element of this genre (named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the ten best places to live in America, the picturesque, sleepy town of Littlefield ticks all the family-friendly middle-class East Coast suburban boxes – home to college professors, psychologists and educated professionals; great schools; and a quaint village centre), but behind the white picket fences and kempt family homes lurks “a black forest crawling with beasts and creatures, phantoms and monsters”. Somebody is poisoning the local dogs – taking the protest against the proposed ‘off-leash’ section of the town’s Baldwin Park into their own hands – and the residents, with their crumbling marriages, precarious employment situations, and general ennui, already “balanced on the blade edge of disaster”, are now constantly looking over their shoulders, “thinking something prowled in every shadow”. This middle-class discontent is an American literary tradition we can trace back to the novels of Yates and Cheever, if not earlier, yet it remains as compelling as ever. Why do you think this is?

“To me, the American suburbs are an ideal dramatic landscape: they’re often very lovely-looking, with lots of trees and well-kept houses, each mown lawn flowing into the next, as if everyone lives in a bucolic, democratic ideal, one enormous park. And yet behind every gleaming doorknocker is a little knot of human beings struggling with problems. Difficult children, professional failures, substance abuse, illness, disability, mental disorders, financial setbacks, infidelities. All the normal snakes that slither into life, but in this case, they’re slithering around a leafy paradise, where everyone else seems to be so happy. A kind of cognitive dissonance that makes the unhappy feel lonelier than ever. Dissonance is profoundly useful to the novelist because it’s so worrisome to the reader; in this case, it’s the contradiction that lies between a sensible and composed exterior – such as most of us try to present to the world, and which the suburbs epitomise – and a chaotic and weird interior, which everyone experiences during times of stress. The harder a character tries to cling to a ‘normal’ appearance amid inner disturbance, the higher the tension.”

Do you see The Dogs of Littlefield (and, indeed, your previous novels) as self-consciously part of this literary heritage?

“When I’m working on a novel, I’m not aware of following any sort of literary tradition – to me, the story seems genre-less, its own entity, which allows for the most freedom when it comes to creating characters and situations. But yes, I’m sure my novels, particularly the first and the most recent one, fit into a category I’ve heard described as Suburban Pastoral. And I like the idea of being part of a literary heritage – it’s like chiming in on a long and involved conversation.”

We have this idea of the novelist as observer and documenter – someone who watches the world around them then distils the essence of what they see into their fiction. As I read the novel, I couldn’t help but keep thinking of Clarice Watkins, the sociologist who arrives in the town to study the inhabitants and through whose eyes we see much of the drama unfolding, as something of a ‘novelist’. So much of her work is about imposing a narrative onto the events of the town and the lives of her subjects – I’m thinking here, of course, particularly about her proposed monograph with its ‘case study’ chapter on Littlefield resident Margaret Downing. Can you explain a little about your thoughts behind Clarice’s character and the role she plays in the narrative? At what point, if ever, did you realise the importance of featuring an ‘outsider’ in the novel?

“Clarice came about because I wanted to write a social comedy about menace and I needed a character who could observe other characters acting out as a result of real or perceived threats to themselves and their community. The inhabitants of Littlefield don’t have enough objectivity to comment on their own behaviour. So when I began thinking what kind of character could be objective – or at least would think of herself as objective – both an outsider and a social scientist came to mind. And I thought it was a funny idea, a sociocultural anthropologist coming to study a suburban town where everyone takes yoga classes and worries about their children’s SAT scores. I hadn’t conceived of Clarice as a kind of novelist, but you’re right, she is imposing a narrative on the town and its inhabitants by trying to use them to prove a theory – though in the end she fails to write her monograph, which I see as a triumph of moral intellect. As soon as you try to make ‘real’ people correspond to an idea you have of them, you wind up oversimplifying them, which is why, as Clarice finally admits, her findings in Littlefield are too ‘problematic’ for a monograph.”

The Dogs of Littlefield is set in your home state of Massachusetts, so how much of the novel is based on your own social observation? Do you see yourself as a sort of Clarice Watkins, and to what extent are you inspired by the people and places around you? Where does reality end and fiction begin?

“The whole novel is based on my social observations, but that doesn’t mean the story is ‘true’, in that you could locate people who correspond to characters in the book. Comic novels require amplification, and I’d say mine amplifies the self-absorption and insecurities you might find among families in suburban America. On the other hand, most of us are self-absorbed and insecure, at least to some extent, so while I put a suburban New England town under the microscope here, I don’t feel I was confining my observations to suburbanites. For instance, something that I find both poignant and fascinating and is, to some degree, a corollary of self-absorption, is how little we know about what goes on inside of other people. You can live with someone for years, like Margaret and Bill in my novel, and make entirely wrong assumptions about that person. Chekhov said: ‘the personal life of every individual is based on secrecy,’ which if you agree with him means that we are all of us, every day, surrounded by mysteries.”

You rather wonderfully describe the residents of Littlefield as being “strangely infatuated with the idea of menace” – something that surprises Clarice as, compared with her previous case study of an inner-city neighbourhood of Mexico City, she assumes these wealthy Littlefieldians would be balanced, happy people. I read the novel as a collective outbreak of hysteria – neuroses borne out of too much comfort, something akin to that suffered by the drawing room-confined middle-class women in turn of the century Vienna treated by Freud. Do you think that’s a valid interpretation?

“I certainly tried to invoke the ghost of Freud at various points in the story, but hadn’t considered the drawing-room hysteria of late-18th-century Viennese ladies. The inhabitants of Littlefield may resemble those women in having too much time on their hands, and in paying too much attention to small disturbances as a result, but they seem more like social tuning forks to me. Their relative comfort allows them enough emotional bandwidth to pick up all sorts of menacing vibrations from an uneasy, unstable world – though they may register those vibrations as coming from down the block. As for collective hysteria, that seems like a rather apt description of the current American political system.”

Do you think the real world is as full of such deep discontent, anger and fear as that of Littlefield and the psyches of its inhabitants?

“Well, since I just mentioned the political situation in America, I’d have to say yes, at least here. Our economy is unstable. Washington is a partisan nightmare. People have been shooting children in our schools. Climate change is threatening our coastline. We live in dread of another terrorist attack. The feeling that something is out there, waiting to get you, is pretty common these days, and not just in Littlefield.”

Are you working on anything new right now? Do you think you might stay in suburbia for your next novel or switch settings?

“The novel I’m working on now has three different settings: the woods of northern Vermont, rural Virginia in the 1960s, and Amsterdam in 1944. So I guess I’ve left suburbia behind – for the moment.”

Source: http://bookanista.com/suzanne-berne/

The Killer Across the Potomac

Editor’s Note: A Crime in the Neighborhood is the first novel by Suzanne Berne, and it takes a startling look at the meaning of crime. It tells thestory of what can happen when a child’s accusation is the only lead in a case of sexual assault and murder, and it sheds light on what might be the motives of a child who points an accusing finger.

The winter I turned thirteen, I was in my bedroom one night listening to the radio when the news came on to report that a girl at a Virginia boarding school just across the river had been murdered. Someone had grabbed her as she parked her bicycle behind the school chapel and dragged her into the woods. She’d been found by her own father’s search party early the next morning, half-naked, tied to a tree. They must have passed close by her during the night. The news announcer went on to say that if the girl had been found sooner she might have lived; she died not of her wounds, but of hypothermia.

This was 1974. It happened that I was set to attend that same boarding school in the fall, and the news of this girl’s murder deeply shocked me. Or perhaps I should say it deeply impressed me. I’d watched TV reports about the Vietnam War, of course, and Washington Post while wearing my nickel-plated POW bracelet. I’d followed some of the Watergate hearings in school, and listened to President Nixon’s resignation speech just the summer before, at my uncle’s house, while my uncle—a Republican who sent Nixon birthday cards— wept silently and my father—a Democrat—tried not to look triumphant. In the sixth grade I had even been briefly newsworthy myself (our class had voted in favor of be coming communists, and one of the kids in our class was the child of a top presidential aide). But this particular news involved me in a way I’d never felt involved in any news before. A girl my age, going to the same school I would soon attend, had been killed. A girl I might have known. A girl who, had the circumstances been a little different, might even have been me.

As I recall the story, the man who killed the girl had swum across the Potomac River—a river swollen by winter rains and full of rapids, especially where he crossed it—then, like Frankenstein’s monster, he scaled a cliff to reach the school chapel. Two years before he’d grabbed another girl behind the chapel, but when he relaxed his hold on her for a moment, she ran away. He shouted after her that he would come back, that he would get her the next time. Almost immediately the police caught the man and he was sent to a mental hospital. But the girl was so convinced that he would come back for her that she called the mental hospital every week to make sure the man was still there.

She left school, but she kept calling the hospital. Then one day someone at the hospital said the man had been released. Right away the girl telephoned the boarding school and told her old headmistress the man was free. But no one paid attention.

This was the part of the story that frightened me more than the murder itself. That even such vigilance couldn’t prevent a horrible crime from happening struck me as unreasonable and terrifying. The world wobbled; something rattled and came loose. Life had pretty much made sense until then, but suddenly nothing seemed reliable. Someone had warned the school that this man—this monster—would return, and no one listened. It didn’t make any more sense to me than the fact that the murdered girl’s father could have saved her if only he’d walked ten yards to the left at one point, instead of ten yards to the right. Or that, after all she had suffered and survived, she died of something a woolen blanket could have prevented.

I suppose if I had to determine exactly when I became interested in writing fiction it would be that moment, when I saw life veer out of control and I wanted to know why. To me, fiction is about making sense of things that don’t make sense. In a way it’s a second chance, an opportunity to organize what, in our daily experience, often seems painfully irrational: time; coincidence; other people’s rage, brutality, or carelessness. Life holds inexplicable calamities; fiction does not. But what I love most about fiction is that you can use it to examine those moments when everything changes forever—the moment when an old way of understanding the world no longer works and a new way has to be found. In fiction, you can also be in charge of what happens next.

Years went by and I thought I’d forgotten about that murder. And I had forgotten about it, in the way you file certain events deep within your memory, out of immediate reach, where they stay until you need them again, or until you are ready to understand them. Then a few years ago I began writing A Crime in the Neighborhood, a novel that opens with the murder of a boy not far from his own house. I set the novel in a suburb near where I grew up, in Washington, D.C. And yet I wrote those early pages describing the murder with a particular confidence; they’re really the only part of the novel that never changed throughout all the revisions. I also set the novel at the beginning of the Watergate scandal, though I’d forgotten how Water – gate hung over my own childhood. I even made the main character a young girl whose parents are splitting up—as my parents did (although much later and less dramatically), as did so many of my friends’ parents in the 1970s. In fact, the story is much more about her family’s destruction, and the destruction of a community’s sense of stability, than it is about a child’s murder.

But it wasn’t until after I’d finished a first draft that I realized I’d written about concerns that shaped my youth and that now seem to define the present. Mine was the first generation to grow up in a world of pervasive insecurity; where most people don’t trust the government, don’t leave their back doors unlocked, don’t believe for certain that their marriage will last. These fears took root in the early 1970s, blossomed during the 1980s, and now feed the political and social issues of our times. My generation—I’m at the end of the baby boomers—is full of scared people. Safety is a national obsession. In fact, safety consciousness has become the new sign of affluence: if they can afford to do it, people eat organically grown food, they draft pre nuptial agreements, they drive Volvo station wagons or Range Rovers, they conduct criminal checks on babysitters, they even reside in gated communities.

But as political as I think this book may be, it’s also very much a “domestic novel” in that I’ve tried to look at the society I know by looking at one family, and I’ve tried to explore the cruelties within that one family as a way to understand the cruelties and insecurities of my world. There’s a set of sisters, for instance, that gets torn apart by one sister’s sexual rebellion, just as there was a family before the father left it, a safe neighborhood before a child was killed there, and a reasonably unified government before five inept burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters on the night of June 17, 1972.

What I Don’t Know About Mark Twain

When I was about ten, I discovered in my father’s study a shelf of handsome, red, limp-leather volumes, their covers embossed with a man’s bewhiskered, scowling profile. It was a full set of Mark Twain’s books, given to my father as a boy not long after his mother died. He’d read them over and over, he told me, adding that Mark Twain had just about saved his life during those sad years. My father’s motherless boyhood was almost unthinkable to me–how could I survive without my own mother?-–but I was impressed that his life had been saved by a writer, so I read the books as a found them, starting with Roughing It and ending with Joan of Arc. At times, I hardly understood what I was reading, but I carried on anyway, wanting to oblige my father and mesmerized by the voice of Mark Twain, that intimate, keen, wisecracking, impatient, thunderous, all-knowing voice. It sounded to me then like the voice of God.

Twenty years later on a cold November afternoon, I arrived in the driveway of Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, where a tour was already underway. A young guide was telling a small crowd that visitors often believe that Mark Twain designed his house to look like a steamboat. I stepped back to look at the house–which is large and rambling and built of bricks, and yet seems somehow buoyant, with a prowlike veranda and cheerful little balconies and three smokestack chimneys–and sure enough, it did look like a steamboat. But the tour guide added that Twain did not intend for this house to look like a steamboat and that a host of the other misconceptions were really wishful thinking on the part of his admirers.

She went on to tell us that Mark Twain had fathered three daughters, the oldest of whom was called Susy. T his was also my childhood name, spelled slightly differently. Susy and her sisters used to put on plays in their schoolroom, in which they wore their mother’s gowns and impersonated English queens and ordered each other’s beheadings. I recalled similar dramatics with my own two younger sisters–we were likewise drawn the bloodthirsty themes. Our tour guide described how Twain had entertained his little girls by the living room fire, making up thrilling stories about the bric-a-brac on the living room mantle. My father, too, had been an inventive storyteller. He used to sit us next to him on the piano bench and tell wild, funny stories about ogres and witches based on the notes he played, ending always with a reverberant glissando.

A dangerous but absorbing confusion began forming in my mind as I wandered through Mark Twain’s house, peering at his wallpaper and admiring his carved Venetian four-poster bed. The more I discovered about Mark Twain’s daughters, the more I felt I already knew. Their father had been hot-tempered and humorous; so had mine. They had lived in a big beautiful house; which was later lost to them; so had I. It hardly mattered that the differences between our families were far more numerous than the similarities; that there were similarities at all between my family and Mark Twain’s seemed heady enough.

Ten years after visiting his house, I began a novel about Mark Twain’s daughters. It would be a historical novel, I decided, set in Hartford during the Gilded Age. I could already visualize the Merchant Ivory movie that would follow-three decorative little Victorian girls in white pinafores bowling hoops on a green lawn while their fierce-looking father smoked his corncob pipe in the background. But after three years of trying, I found that I could not do it.

I sat down and listed various theories to account for my failure: Mark Twain would have resented such an intrusion into his family life. I had done too much research and become musclebound with facts. I identified too much with the daughters. No plot that I could devise did the justice to the girls’ complexity, plus my motives for writing about them were murky and contaminated by self-regard. All true.

Yes it was at this painful moment that the book I was eventually to write came into being. What really interested me, I finally understood, were the ways in which we claim to understand other people’s lives based on our own. Misconceptions and wishful thinking are as much a part of what we know about other people as any “truthful” details about them. As the narrator of my book says about her father, whose version of her childhood does not agree with her own: “That was the story he put together from all those details, a story like that, like most stories people tell themselves about other people, was mostly about him.”

This character, who writes historical novels for girls and happens to be writing about Mark Twain’s daughters, has finally figured it all out. Then again, the minute you think you’ve got the last word on someone-well, that’s exactly when he gets away from you, isn’t it?

Editor’s Note: Suzanne Berne’s second novel, A Perfect Arrangement, plunges us into the lives of the Cook-Goldman family, for whom everything should be coming up roses. But as she demonstrated in her first novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood, darkness lurks in every heart, even in suburbia. The mother of two, Berne found herself juggling her time between her real and fictional families. Occasionally, she got confused.

One of the disconcerting things about writing a novel while taking care of young children is that—for the time it takes to write the novel at least— you have too many people on your mind. There’s your real family, of course, who need lunch, clean underwear, a trip to the park, Kleenex, your undivided attention. Then there’s your fictional family, who need a place to live, something to do, disasters to keep them interesting, minor triumphs to keep them going. And by the way, that fictional family also requires lunch and clean underwear from time to time, and they certainly need your undivided attention.

I’ve just spent two years between families, as it were, with an overpopulated brain and perpetually bisected attention, and though it’s by no means impossible to write a novel and raise children, frankly it’s not the most comfortable way to live, either.

For instance, last year both of my daughters were out of the house three days a week for five hours. Those fifteen hours a week were supposed to belong exclusively to the Cook-Goldman family, so that I could help them first make a terrible mess of their lives and then, more or less, get out of it. I’d drop off the girls, race home, sit down at my computer and start typing. Then inevitably my neighbor would stop by, my mother would call, the UPS man would appear. Or I’d walk down the hall and notice the unmade beds, the broken crayons littering the bathroom floor, the foothills of laundry surrounding the hamper, the list of messages on the kitchen wipe off board. Not surprisingly, all those things made it into my novel, adding to the burdens and irritations of my characters as they added to mine.

Just as my life was always intruding into my novel, my novel was forever intruding into my life as well. I’d work as hard as I could during my five hours, then switch off my computer and run out to the car to go pick up the girls— usually forgetting any number of things in the process. School health forms, juice boxes, my contribution for the Pre-K jumble sale, the day care provider’s check. Even though I’d driven away, I hadn’t left the Cook- Goldmans’ house yet, and sometimes I’d lose track of where I was going and drive right past my older daughter’s school. Once I got there early and sat in the parking lot scribbling dialogue onto the back of a phone bill, then looked up to find that I was ten minutes late.

“When are you going to finish your book?” my girls began demanding, especially in the final months when it was all I could do to keep my eyes from crossing. “Soon,” I would mutter back. By this time I’d gotten the Cook-Goldmans into a truly dreadful situation; they were in a panic and then suddenly —it was summer vacation, the children were home, we were going to Vermont for a week, then Alabama, then California to visit relatives. The flu hit my whole family, including my husband the night before he was starting a big trial. My younger daughter wound up in the emergency room. And still the Cook-Goldmans were insisting on being attended to. Look what you’ve done to us, they seemed to shout. What’s going to happen next ?

I worked at night; I worked early in the morning. I worked when the girls were playing, even when they were fighting. I worked while they drew pictures on old drafts on the floor of my study or sat in my lap poking at the keyboard (in fact, one of them is in my lap right now). Sometimes my husband would ask me a question and I would answer in strange non sequiturs. “Do you want Chinese take-out?” he might say. And I’d say, “Dolores has a baby.” “What?” he’d say. “Never mind,” I’d tell him. “Just explain to me one more time what happens during a planning board hearing.” Lest any of this sound charming, I’ll confess that I’ve never felt closer to schizophrenia than while trying to finish my novel. Not that my characters came to life in any fey or whimsical way—I didn’t hear voices, have visions, etc., and I don’t believe in writing as channeling—but I was a truly divided person, as are many women who have careers and families. I did my best. I went grocery shopping and I finished chapters. But much of the time I felt I was disappointing everyone in my life, whether they were flesh and blood or paper and ink.

Then again, I can’t think of any other way to go about writing a novel and having a family. I hope somebody else will figure out the

ideal way to do such a thing someday and publish a book about it. They can even call it A Perfect Arrangement. I won’t mind a bit.