Q&A with Adam Haslett discussion

I always begin writing by inventing characters. The first seeds of Union Atlantic were planted as far back at 1999, when I became interested in how much power the still poorly understood Federal Reserve held over our economy. I decided to place a character high in its chain of command, and I invented Henry Graves. I put the project aside for five years as I completed my story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, and finished law school. When I came back to it, I began work on Charlotte Graves, the retired school teacher living in her family's old summer home in Massachusetts. At the time, I didn't know she'd be Henry's sister. Later, her neighbor, Doug Fanning, the young banker, emerged as a main character, along with Nate Fuller, the boy who comes to Charlotte for tutoring. For me the main challenge in writing the book was how to bring these four different people into the same world because for a long time I wrote about them apart from each other. I finished the book in 2008 just as the financial crisis hit. To me, the financial world of the book was a setting to dramatize larger cultural and personal forces. But given the timing of its release a lot of emphasis was put on the coincidence of my having written about the Fed and a failing bank just as the real world events unfolded. In any case, I'm happy to take questions in this thread on any aspect of the novel.

When you began writing Union Atlantic, did you come to the story with a strong understanding of our financial system. Or did you have a stronger sense of the characters first? How did you determine how much detail you could include about our "poorly understood" system without losing the reader? And on the other side of that, how did you determine how much you could leave out without losing the reader?

I didn't know much about finance at all. A book by William Greider, The Secrets of the Temple, was the first one I read that took me fully inside that world and sparked my interest in the Federal Reserve as a place to set a character. But others in the books--Charlotte and Nate in particular--arrived independently of that interest, as it were. I think most novels, if you dig deep enough, turn out to be a history of a particular author's preoccupations over the course of the time they were writing the novel. Each character in Union Atlantic could be said to represent a different preoccupation of mine: the weight of the past on the present for Charlotte; the intermixing of anger and ambition for Doug; the link between grief, sexuality, and pain for Nate; and the passing away of an old, WASP cultural order for Henry.

When it came to deciding how much detail about the financial world to put into Union Atlantic, the criterion for me was always, How interested am I in this? How much detail would I want to have given me if I were the reader? Ultimately, that's the only guide an author has. Friends and editors help (and they did), but ultimately you write the book you want to read.

When I searched online, I found a partial answer to my question. Can you tell us a little more about why you picked Cotton Mather and Malcolm X as the voices of the dogs? I was specifically curious, because these two historical figures seem only distantly related to America's financial structure.

Also, I love You Are Not a Stranger Here. If you get a chance to put up a section on that, I'd love to hear about how you chose certain characters' behavioral conditions, specifically in the first story and in "...Grief." (The latter story I've had several friends read; I think it's a fantastic short story."

My interest in Mather and Malcolm X began with the simple fact that they're both great wordsmiths, in entirely different ways of course. They are passionate writers and speakers who exhort their audiences in the strongest terms, as if their words were physical objects. So they were exciting to read.

Add to this that my character Charlotte Graves was an old-school liberal who's mind was going and it struck me that these two figures could be seen as two poles of the liberal imaginary--the voice of religious castigation and the invocation of guilt over the original sin of American slavery. But I should be clear that this only came after my affection for the two, my reading of Mather and Malcolm X, put their voices in my own head, much as they are in Charlotte's (though I don't own dogs). When you write something as long as a novel it becomes a compendium of your interests over the course of a number of years, and these two rhetoricians were among those I was reading.

As to You Are Not a Stranger Here, the question for me was never the choice of a condition. I began with people in a predicament, caught in their own minds in one way or another. The texture of their inner lives was dictated by the rhythm of the prose that came to me as I invented them, not from a prior decision to write about a clinical condition. To be certain, I've known and loved people with deeply troubled minds and spirits so I'm not a stranger to that world myself. But the task as a writer wasn't a sociological one; it was aesthetic, personal, and compelled by a need to understand and capture certain extreme interior states.

Thanks for your answers; these makes so much sense now. Also, thanks for answering my YANASH question, because it's a book I've read four times; I am fixated, I guess.

My pleasure. I'm honored that you'd go back to my stories over and over. That's the wonderful thing about fiction. It works with the physical author so entirely absent, it's own little word machine.