Nathan Englander is 37, with tangled black hair, enormous, staring brown eyes
and a long face. He is also intense, though, to be honest, the word does
not begin to do him justice. I ask him when he decided to set his novel, The
Ministry of Special Cases, in Argentina in the 1970s. “Well, that’s ... erm
... funny, because, erm... it’s also like playing your own graduate student,
because to communicate you know you’re sitting there and I’m sitting here
and I come up with these main threads which are true but, you know, through
some process of, you know ... I can say I met these guys, which is true, my
friends in 1989, and again that they are shaped by politics and that got
into ... there are so many different things, you know, and, again, once I
even looked into that world, then, you know, it was just on fire to me, it
was just such a big thing, but I think, for me, it’s on so many fronts, like
...”
Okay, right, er ... what I was actually looking for was a simple date. This
could be a tricky one.
I am sitting at a table in Faber & Faber’s offices, across from one of the
archetypes of contemporary America – the agonised, selfconscious, wandering
Jewish novelist. We’ve had Bellow, we’ve had Roth; now it looks as if we’ve
got Englander. He emerged in 2000 with a collection of short stories, For
the Relief of Unbearable Urges. The Ministry came out in America a couple of
months ago, and its delirious reception confirmed what the stories promised,
the emergence of a very significant talent indeed. But, given his answer to
my first question, getting to the heart of this talent looks like being an
uphill struggle.
Let’s begin with the Jewishness. He was brought up in a middle-class orthodox
family in West Hempstead, Long Island – “A suburban Jewish ghetto,” he says.
His father, Herbert, is an engineer and his mother, Merle, is a mother.
Englander has lapsed from orthodoxy, but is still on good terms with the
family. “Everyone deals with me. They just desperately want me to marry a
Jewish girl. That’s the line in the sand.But I don’t seem to get married.”
At first, he toed the faith line. “I was deeply sincere. I was so religious.”
They were not “black hat” Jews – wearing the full orthodox regalia of
ringlets and black coats – but he did wear his yarmulke and, until he was 14
or 15, he stuck with the rites of his parents. Then he started asking too
many questions.
“I just had questions that weren’t being answered. I guess it’s just that
disappointment that everyone finds in every school, in every life, in every
community where they say this is what’s written and this is the way for
people to act, but sort of people are going by the letter and this is
hypocritical ... It was the relationship between man and man, and man and
God. There was the book stuff, and people would do the ritualistic stuff,
but I asked, who cares about the ritual if this is how we act? The idea that
isn’t this all based on the idea that God exists, which we cannot know ...
then the rabbi would throw me out.”
I think I’m beginning to get the hang of his speech – you just have to accept
he’s using many voices and deploying several perspectives. There is also a
touch of Woody Allen. For example, when I ask him where is he now,
faith-wise, he replies: “I’m a lapsed atheist. I’m a failure. I’m trying to
be an atheist, I’m really trying.” Pure Woody.
The irony was, he finally abandoned his faith in Jerusalem. He went there in
the summer of 1989, while he was at college. To him, of course, it’s not
irony. “However you go off to Jerusalem, you come back the opposite. The
first day I was there was a Saturday, the sabbath, and I got on a bus and I
was convinced I was going to die. It was going to fall off a cliff and I was
going to kill everybody.”
He did not, however, eat nonkosher food in Jerusalem. He saved that for
London. By this time, he was a “1980s hippie”, with hair down his back. “I
came that February to London for the first time, got out at Victoria station
and went straight to Burger King. That was my first cheese-burger. I had
been waiting months to transgress, and I had to wait until February in
London.”
He had wanted to write since reading Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea when he was about eight. His “first fat book” was George
Orwell’s 1984 – “That just blew me away” – then he read Albert Camus’ The
Plague. “We didn’t watch TV at home on Saturdays. That’s when I read those
books that stick with me.”
After college, he drifted, becoming, for a while, a photographer’s assistant
in New York. But his boss told him: “I hope you’re a good writer because
you’re a terrible assistant.” Realising photography wasn’t for him, he did
something so sane, so enviable, so right, I can barely bring myself to
report it. He applied to the University of Iowa.
This is what every aspiring young writer in the world should do, for one
simple reason. At Iowa University is the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and at the
Iowa Writers’ Workshop is Marilynne Robinson, author of two novels,
Housekeeping and Gilead, and a collection of essays, The Death of Adam, and
not only one of the greatest writers alive, but one of the greatest teachers
of writing. “Marilynne Robinson is a goddess to me, Englander says. “She
changed my life. I sat at her feet for two years. I wanted to talk to her
endlessly. She taught me how to think, how to see.”
What he learnt was not what to write – he does not write anything like
Robinson – but why and how to write. Robinson’s work shines with her sense
of the high moral calling of fiction, of the supreme virtue of getting it
right, of telling the truth. Her utter devotion to her art – Gilead emerged
24 years after Housekeeping – struck a chord deep inside Englander. For he
is an obsessive. “I’m not very good at having hobbies; everything I do turns
extreme.” The total immersion in the craft of fiction demanded by Robinson
was exactly what this wandering Jew had been looking for. He was to be a
writer, but a very slow one. It has taken him more than seven years to
complete The Ministry and, when I ask him how long it will be before his
next novel, a question often asked by his publisher, he says: “It will take
what it takes.” He started it two years ago, so don’t hold your breath.
After his first trip to Jerusalem, he returned every summer, then, finally,
two weeks after leaving Iowa, he moved there, staying for five years from
1996 to 2001. His primary impulse was to get away. “I thought, enough with
the community of writers. I guess I just wanted to write short stories and
starve to death.”
He acquired an Israeli girlfriend and improved his Hebrew. “I speak Hebrew
like someone who’s had a really bad education. I sort of have really bad
modern Hebrew and biblical Hebrew. I’d sort of ask for some bread, and
they’d say, ‘Did you just speak Aramaic?’ I’d used some word that hadn’t
been used for 2,000 years, since Christ walked the neighbourhood. That
always silenced a room.”
Secular though he had become, living in Jerusalem meant he was still immersed
in Jewishness. In addition, there were the conflicts of blood and bones, of
the perpetual trading of corpses with the Palestinians. There was also the
great tragic city – Englander loves cities – in which people tried to
construct their ordinary lives, “to go to the coffee shop without getting
blown up”. And, finally, there was the power of memory that drove the city’s
seemingly eternal conflicts. All these came together when he discovered the
story of Argentina’s “dirty war”, the appalling campaign of violence
inflicted on the people by the Videla junta between 1976 and 1983.
The dates were important. Englander had grown up learning about the Holocaust
and being told it must never happen again. But, in Argentina, he found
another Holocaust happening even as he was being taught those things. He
also found another tragic city – Buenos Aires. But he went there only once,
with the friends who had told him about the place. The Ministry of Special
Cases is thus a highly fictionalised work, but one suffused with the
Robinson credo of keeping it true to itself. This trumps all other concerns.
“I feel like it’s only a very rare person that has a right to political themes
... I feel like the obligation of the writer is to the story. Whatever point
I have – that is, personally, me – if I put that in the book, then I think
that is corrupting; it absolutely corrupts the fiction. A book has to be the
creation of a world.”
His point is not that the book is meaningless, but that meaning must not be
imposed, it must be carried unselfconsciously by the story. In fact, the
story of The Ministry is obviously loaded with meaning and resonance. Its
hero, Kaddish Poznan, makes a living by chipping the names off headstones in
a Jewish cemetery. This is to erase a past of which respectable Jews in
Buenos Aires in the 1970s are ashamed, a past in which their mothers were
whores.
On top of that, there is a bizarre plot about cosmetic dentistry – an echo of
the main plot’s issues of identity and appearance. And, of course, there is
the serpentine evil of the Videla regime, with its habit of snatching,
torturing and killing young dissidents. One scene with a general is an
unforgettable, tooth-grinding portrait of beautifully mannered evil.
But Englander is good, very, even if, in conversation, he doesn’t always make
complete sense. He had me on his side the moment he went to Iowa, or perhaps
when he said: “I guess I feel confused about everything in life except
aesthetic things, which areclear to me. If the fiction demandsit, then I
think it is true.”
— The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander is published by Faber &
Faber at £14.99. To buy it for £13.50 (inc p&p), call The
Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
| www.bryanappleyard.com
