LORNA SORE

Identity Theory is a fantastic website, evidenced by this interview between George Saunders and Robert Birnbaum. I love unstructured interviews like this.

RB: I do wonder why there is this limiting thing about reading your stories—maybe it’s that the density of a story is as if it were a novel. And I only have so much head space available—

GS: When I am imagining it, I will have a longer description and my feeling is that I’d have the physicality in my mind, then it will kind of unpack for the reader—but only at a certain pace of reading. If it’s too fast, my experience is that the physicality doesn’t have time to unpack, but if you take a story—the story, if you read it slow enough, then you are supplying physicality to it. That’s maybe when I talk about the trilogy thing, I’d like to go back and reinvestigate that. These GQ pieces have had a lot do with it. There you have to describe physical things. And you find out that there is actually a pleasure in that and I am not actually so bad at it. Early on, as a reaction against my own bone-headed MFA early stories, I said, “No more description. How many times do we need a kitchen described? We know what a kitchen is, let’s get going.” So now I am taking a bit of a step back and saying there are pleasures of language in describing a kitchen and the type of kitchen matters and so on—
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RB: If you have been a hard core short story writer it strikes me you become a junky for the quick satisfaction of closing down a story and the—

GS: Right.

RB: —whereas a novel—

GS: —see what I have trouble with is that I don’t have long-term faith in any one idea. I don’t mean that as a diss on myself. I love the multiplicity of saying, like this Brad Corrigan story, 79 or 80% of the time I was going, “This is a stupid ass idea. This can’t sustain a story.” Then I kept saying, “Try, try.” And finally at the end I was convinced it was, but I didn’t want to spend four years doing that. And part of the reason I could do it was I knew it wasn’t forever. It was a five month thing and then if I wanted to—which I did, I could back and react against it with something like Bohemians which is more realist. In a way being a little bit indecisive or maybe schizophrenic aesthetically you can say, “I believe in Thing A 100 percent.” Knowing that you can believe in Thing B 100 percent next week. So the idea of sustaining some aesthetic principle for 500 pages, I am not sure I have the character for it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 17th, 2006 at 10:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized.