Claire Messud’s novel This Strange Eventful History is being called her most autobiographical, and I’m sure it will resonate beautifully with many readers. It is a rich and detailed work, Bergmanesque in its stretching across time and exposing of every facet of family life, reminiscent of the sterling prose of Shirley Hazzard in its execution, featuring various members of the Cassar family as they struggle and survive from World War II to the 2010s. Seven decades, nine countries, and multiple points of view conspire to ensorcell the reader with storytelling verve and linguistic aplomb, pulling readers into a complex work of contemporary literature. Itinerant and immersive, it is an ambitious undertaking that should delight a wide variety of literary citizens.

Messud teaches presently at Harvard University and this is her seventh work of fiction. She’s a New York Times best-selling author who also publishes essays and book reviews and has received Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships alongside the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her new work of fiction is inspired by her own lineage (including an unpublished 1,500-page family history written by her grandfather), but its historic range and stylistic inventions drive it far from discussions of “autofiction” or “memoir” and more toward a combination of the classical and the postmodern.

In this discussion, I aim to engage with Claire about her new novel This Strange Eventful History while also dialoguing in a more holistic way about my own concerns regarding anything that focuses on artist > art and whether I might be contributing more to the problem than the solution by doing author Q&As and interviews. Throughout, I’m thinking on the great Susan Sontag’s landmark 1964 essay “Against Interpretation,” which worries about art discourse that focuses too much on content, or even on the separation of content and form at all, concluding with an exhortation to “recover our senses,” to be able to see art for what it is, to make art more real to its community of readers and appreciators. “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

Sean Hooks (SH): I want to start off on the idea of the writer as public intellectual. You are quite the established and articulate person of letters. I’m having trepidations because I got into doing these Q&As and interviews during the pandemic lockdowns, and I’m worrying that I’m contributing to this obsession with the artist instead of the art. I think about “the cult of personality,” which is a term that I grew up hearing and it was as something to abjure; I think about Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation.” I’m thinking that I should be against this cult of personality, this “interview-ation” thing.

You’ve published essays and reviews in really respected places for 20 years now. You’ve talked with plenty of established writers yourself—to name a few, Salman Rushdie, Herta Müller, Jennifer Egan, Jenny Erpenbeck, Min Jin Lee, Yiyun Li, Richard Price—so I just wanted to hear you talk about the role of the writerly interview, the book review, these varied ancillary duties for the literary writer in 2024, and you doing yeoman’s work in that regard alongside publishing novels. Your new book This Strange Eventful History is of some length, which is also something I’m interested in, so the purpose or value or relevance of things outside the books themselves is a springboard that I want to offer.

Claire Messud (CM): It’s certainly true that this question of the conversation around books and literature has changed a lot in the last 20 or 25 years, and since the iPhone, and before that with the advance of the internet and technology all around. When I think about what a bookstore event used to be, for example. Not that long ago it was a writer reading, sometimes for quite a long time, just reading from the book and then maybe talking a little. But now it’s sort of a given that audiences don’t care to listen to a long reading from a book.

We spent a year in Germany when our kids were small and our daughter wanted very much to go to a reading because there was an American children’s author coming to hold an event, and he read in English and then it was translated by a German translator and the entire event went on for an hour. The children were all between the ages of seven and ten and were expected to sit quietly for an hour and listen even when what they were listening to, half of it, they couldn’t understand. The German commitment to rigor is impressive, but that was 2010 or 2011 and I feel like that was still not considered insane, and yet now that would seem preposterous.

So I don’t have a simple answer. But I do think one of the reasons that the interview culture exists in the way it does—where even the bookstore literary event is often a conversation rather than an author speaking—is because, as you suggested, there’s been a turn toward the person and the personality and the brand. That’s not a focus that I think has come from authors. It has come from the people who are trying to encourage a reading public to read, or at least to buy, books.

SH: That seems a good place to zoom in, because if it’s not coming from the literary community, it would seem then to be coming from some sort of publishing apparatus. I read your novel—which by the industry’s purview would be considered “long,” as if 428 pages or approximately 145,000 words is some sort of lengthy, old-school epic—in under a week while teaching five classes at the university where I work, and I don’t see that as some sort of feat. I know plenty of educated working people in various realms who read long books, not all of them literary fiction of course, but I distrust this insistence that we all live in TikTokLand now, whether we like it or not, and we need our meat cut up into tiny little pieces for us.

In This Strange Eventful History, I see perhaps an author trying to return something to American literature, a more worldly sort of saga, a mode that you haven’t inhabited since The Emperor’s Children (2006), and expanding quite a bit even on what you were attempting in that book. Was there a conscious effort? Did you see or hear people in publishing saying “write shorter, write shorter, give them tiny little books” because that’s what some imagined desired demographic wants? Or would you just speak to the idea of the publishing empire and your choices in making this text your most recent endeavor?

CM: You raise such important questions! I do feel as though I have been so lucky, so fortunate, and I have a wonderful publishing house with Norton, which I think is quite different in atmosphere from many other houses. And I have a wonderful editor, Jill Bialosky, who is herself a writer of fiction, poetry, and memoir, so I feel like I’m spoiled in the sense that nobody has said to me, “You should write shorter.”

But I’ve been struck with it when teaching in summer programs and there are very wonderful writers working on novels and they have been attending conferences and AWP and having all sorts of publishing-related conversations. They will say things about being told, “It can’t be more than X length” or “You can’t have a flashback in the first fifty or seventy-five pages,” and I think: Who made these rules?

So—I say this with only anecdotal evidence and without any actual knowledge about the broader publishing world—I think one of the things that’s happening, or maybe already has happened, is that more and more people are writing and trying to publish. And that could be a wonderful thing! But it becomes increasingly competitive simply to have your work read. That becomes the first and biggest hurdle: just to have somebody who could in any way publish or promote your work. To just get those people to read it is really tough, and I think that has generated a whole host of advisors who make statements like, “You know, well, this is how long your book should be, this will improve its chances, if it’s too long somebody won’t read it, but if it did this they would read it.” It’s making up rules that are artificial.

SH: I like that idea a lot, about artificiality. That’s how these things get in the water supply and then they go viral, and then the point of genesis is untraceable.

CM: And they’re taken as truths! Like, “Well, didn’t you know … ?”

SH: Okay, so then I’d like to talk about the things you do as a writer that are not the writing of fiction itself. You’ve done a notable amount of interviews and reviews and you work as a public figure in the writing community and have done so for quite some time now. In your piece “The Time for Art is Now” from the Paris Review (2018) and later collected in Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write (2022) you state that “between the demands of social media … and the lessons disseminated by our culture and its so-called leaders … we risk losing sight of what makes existence meaningful.” So isn’t then the real resistance for writers in blocking everything out and making art instead of doing all these other things that people do? Again, I’m largely talking about online discourse, whether that’s typing out propaganda for whichever ideologue’s podcast is trending, or whatever the cause célèbre is this week, or whichever literary magazine’s editors are resigning in a hissy fit because they don’t agree with the contents of their own publications. And just to clarify, again, I’m not talking those sort of intentional and age-old stewardship-and-ambassadorship type of conversations between artists, but should we all be a bit more Salingerian or Pynchonian, or like Don DeLillo communicating with his agents and editors via fax machine, Patrick deWitt with his flip phone, his TV only for watching DVDs that he gets primarily from the library, and no Wi-Fi in his house, or Helen DeWitt toiling away in Berlin, canceling all of her press and interviews for The English Understand Wool?

CM: So I started writing about books when I lived in the UK, not long out of university. There were many newspapers and journals that I was writing for—the Guardian and TLS and the Times and the European—and I saw myself very much just answering the question of how to earn a living.

At that time, I didn’t teach and I was young and I was working as a critic and journalist. And there’s a long and strong literary tradition of that kind of writing that goes back centuries, so that’s not something that’s separate from the work of being a writer: to be in community in some way, to be in conversation, critical conversation with other writers, that does not seem to be something separate from the creative work. It all seems intertwined, so I’m reluctant to say that anybody should or shouldn’t do anything.

I’m somebody who is suspicious of certainty generally. So I think the people who are inclined to be reclusive should decidedly be reclusive, and the people who are inclined to do a thousand different things, yes, they might be described as dilletantes in some way, but that can be great too. I like to believe the literary world is broad enough for all sorts.

But what I worry about is where you started: this idea that there there’s a distraction, a turning away from actually talking about books, or the ideas in books, or the characters in books, and a focus instead on personality and the persona of an author sometimes, which overshadows the work. I’m sure that’s always happened to some extent, but in a time when so much is visual and abbreviated, it’s a culture of images. Increasingly images, rather than words. And then if there are words there, they’re kept to a minimum.

In France, where I spent time in my youth, the public literary figure Bernard Pivot died very recently. That’s someone who to an anglophone world was already an extraordinary person doing an extraordinary thing: making, for 15 years, Apostrophes, an hours-long television chat show about literature! I don’t know if we in America ever had that. I suppose some Charlie Rose episodes could count, but my memory of Charlie Rose’s literary conversations was that he would start by sort of putting his hand on the book and saying “tell me about this book,” and that seemed to be because he hadn’t actually read it.

Maybe you just can’t combat the realities of life. But it does feel like there’s less room for all the discussion around what’s in a work of art: the structure and the different nuances and the different ways that people read it, the conversation between how you might understand a particular novel and how I might understand it.

I believe in the amazing complexities of what we can express and convey in language if people will only make the effort and take the time.

SH: Are we just nostalgic for the pre-smartphone era then? There was always a fringe element to literature, to film, to the arts, but there’s a difference between, on one hand, a café society, a salon-style place in the real world where people discuss art with strangers, and, on the other hand, the internet. Now yes, there have always been what I’d call the “scenesters at the gallery opening,” but the dehumanization of technology is different. The existentialists and the great philosophers worried about that from the get-go. Heidegger, Sartre, Kierkegaard: they were all highly dubious of mechanization and automation.

From your nonfiction writing, you seem to worry that these things (the internet and smartphones) have to some extent divided and conquered us.

CM: I really do believe in our animal selves, the experience of being in a room. It’s like the experience of the play versus a movie. It’s a different thing to be in the theater where a play is embodied in that way, it’s a different experience and it’s less controllable. And it has less control when you’re in a room where there’s a literary conversation happening in person: unpredictable things can happen and you’re engaged in a different sort of way. That does still go on!

I’m struck by the fact that in this sort of post-pandemic world—yes, it was wonderful that there was Zoom rather than nothing at all, it provided a great solace and was a wonderful thing in those years—but I’m struck by how people have really turned away from that to say, “No. I want to do this in-person. I want this to be in-person,” because people felt so strongly the frustration of the virtual world.

SH: It’s clearly a diminishment, that virtual world. Speaking with young people, as I do as a professor, they can tell that difference too. It’s not just people like us in our 40s and 50s. Some of my students were in their mid-teens when the pandemic hit and they had never been to a concert. For a time, their only option was to watch videos of old concerts or to watch people play music on a Zoom. Then they get a little older, they go to a real concert, and it’s not just different but night-and-day different! And it’s a similar thing with education. Yes, as you say, education via Zoom may have been better than nothing, but it’s a case of: You’re not going to starve, but you’re definitely going to be malnourished if that’s all you do and if the virtual world is the totality or the primacy of your interacting with others.

If your interactions are through that mediated device, you’re not really in the world.

CM: It’s a third space, it’s a different one, but it is also now a big part of our lives. I have kids who are 20 and 22 and it’s a huge part of their lives. Inseparable. They don’t really know or remember a time before smartphones. My daughter sometimes says, “I feel envious of you guys, to have grown up without that,” which is a whole other conversation, but it is so intertwined with every aspect of life—it’s your clock, it’s your telephone, it’s your banking system, it’s your television, it’s your entertainment, it’s your work, it’s everything.

And people don’t separate themselves from the machine. Yes, Heidegger, et al, as you say, the great thinkers. Walter Benjamin! Benjamin would be horrified. Horrified.

SH: You are writing in opposition to it in a way that can be dismissed as old fashioned, as “writing from another century,” but I see in your work an attention to detail. You were mentioning Pivot’s passing, and we also lost A. S. Byatt recently, we lost Richard Serra recently, and I think of those two in particular as detailed as well, as sort of “conflagrational” artists. They’re detailed but they’re going for big things, and in your new novel, This Strange Eventful History, there’s that attention to detail, just in the descriptions. This recalls for me another point from your most recent nonfiction collection, the essay “Mother’s Knee,” where you assert that an hour spent with Kant is superior to one spent with the Kardashians, and that even good young adult fiction (which barely existed when you were young), like the Harry Potter books, are far from Primo Levi, so this level of detail that you aspire to and achieve requires time and space.

Perhaps you and I worry that in our contemporary culture, our attenuated novels speak to our attenuated attention spans. Now, of course, a novella or short novel can be brilliant; but in this internet age your new book seems consciously written as a sort of bunker. Is that too strong of a word?

CM: I feel people need to be free, so if what people want to write and want to read is something more abbreviated, potentially diverting, entertaining, then that’s what people should write and read. I’m more really just, if you will: I am who I am. And I have the preoccupations I have, and the interests that I have, and as a writer I have the formal interests that I have, and so I’m hoping there are still some people who might care to read my work.

But I don’t feel it’s my place to convert people. “Bunker” seems like a war footing, and so I guess I’m little uneasy with that, so yes, that might be a bit strong.

SH: Okay, but you have expressed some pretty strong opinions over the years in a variety of essays.

CM: I’m big into our embodied selves. I’m big into all the things I believe. I’m a proselytizer for the work, and I believe in the amazing complexities of what we can express and convey in language if people will only make the effort and take the time.

I was asked to write a fairly short piece for the Yale Review to accompany them opening their archive of pieces by Virginia Woolf, published in the 1920s and ’30s. This was eight or ten pieces, some of which are quite well known; rereading them, I was struck by how much I had been shaped by her. If you’d asked me before writing that piece, I don’t think I would have thought to say, “Almost all of those essays shaped me when I was young.”

But I was shaped by them. And as well by her fiction. And Woolf speaks about how she’s a big believer in the common reader, and the power and the importance of the common reader rather than some idea that literature should be in the hands of scholars or intellectuals or a sort of top-down imposition. She says that books stay alive because people want to read them.

The books that people love are the books that don’t die. There has to be pleasure. It has to be something you want to read. But then she goes on and she says in a different essay that to read a great book is not necessarily easy, or simply entertaining. A great book requires effort on the part of a reader as well, and I really believe that too. So I suppose one of the things I feel I am an advocate for is keeping faith in pleasures that aren’t simple, in difficult pleasures, in things that sometimes take more effort than the simplest path.

I certainly don’t think that any sort of reading experience will be more widely experienced by any of us scolding other people about what they should or shouldn’t be doing. People have to want to do it, and they have to like it. But also in a broader sense, the tacit messages that we send out as a culture right now don’t encourage harder pleasures, they encourage easier pleasures. It’s easier to watch a program or a film than it is to read because you have to imagine when you’re reading. It takes effort.

So just as an aside, but it’s an analogous thing, and you may know this from teaching at a university, but it’s a thing I wasn’t aware of until the last couple of years: If you’re a foreign student, an international student at an American college, if you do a STEM concentration, you automatically get two and possibly three years’ extension on your visa after you finish studying, but if you do humanities you only get one year. What is the American government telling the world? It’s saying to the world, “Somebody who studies science is three times more valuable to us than somebody who studies literature.”

I feel that’s a terrible mistake. That’s at the level of government that a terrible mistake is being made. If the entire culture gives out the message that reading and language don’t matter, that’s disastrous.

SH: That opens up a larger question about just how far from “the mainstream” literature is, and the answer is probably going to be pretty disturbing. I’m not pining for some glorious past where difficult or challenging works, like those of Woolf or Faulkner or whichever modernist you want to mention, sold millions of copies, because that’s not going to come back. But the larger point—about the function of deep and challenging literature in a time where so much of what gets hyped and lauded is anything but deep and challenging—makes us pose that question. Just how far from the mainstream is literary fiction? Is it the equivalent of choral music? Mannerist painting?

Obviously you want your book to sell a lot of copies. But at the same time you have to reckon with the fact that we’re not at a place where works of literature are well regarded at a very high cultural level.

CM: These are all the eternal questions! One of the things that helps me a little bit is that for many years I had a wonderful agent named Georges Borchardt, who’s now in his 90s. He had this sort of long view, and I remember 20 years ago kvetching about, “Oh, the world, they don’t want to read literature,” and he reconfigured what I was saying, he quoted a very elegant, eloquent quote that essentially made the same point and then said “André Gide, 1906.” So I think there’s the sense that this has always been with us. Virginia Woolf in the ’20s was complaining that the age of proper reading was ending because people were listening to the radio.

There’s long been a sense of urgent anxiety about diminishing audiences for serious fiction or just diminishing audiences in general, but the fact is there are more books being sold than ever. Not literary books necessarily, but more books being sold, more people reading, people listening to things on audiobook. A woman I know said she listens to books while she’s swimming, which seems somehow confusing to me; I couldn’t really understand the idea of the waterproof earbud, I guess. But the ways people are taking in stories evolves and changes.

I think we have an appetite for stories and that is undiminished. It’s possible to say it’s going to be like painting ivory miniatures, it’s going to be like choral music, it’s going to be like letterpress printing, of which I’m a great fan! Letterpress printing doesn’t have a big audience. It has a small community now.

But at the same time, I feel like: We’re here. It’s the Shakespeare line: “the worst is not so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’” We’re here. We’re in the world. We’re writing, we’re reading, we’re talking. You and I are talking. That’s a help. 

Featured image: Claire Messud.