Season two is in full throttle now and we cannot wait to keep spoiling you listeners! In this episode of the Book Maven: A Literary Revue, Bethanne Patrick sits down with Christopher Bollen to talk about writing characters of all ages and grounding them with location and setting.
King Lear is discussed in this week’s Pop! Goes the Culture, and all of its various adaptations. From queens to musicals, John Lennon to fictional rewrites, there is a version of King Lear for everyone to love.
Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include The Book of Love by Kelly Link, The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The Garden by Claire Beams, Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, and Wild Houses by Colin Barrett.
Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.
The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.
All titles mentioned: Havoc by Christopher Bollen, Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie,
Shattered and My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Lucy Greeley's Autobiography of a Face, Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones, In the Forest and A Pagan Place and The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien, Dublin Murder Squad (series) by Tana French, Small Things Like These and Foster by Claire Keegan, Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor, King Lear by William Shakespeare, “The Yiddish King Lear” and “Mirele Efros” by Jacob Gordin, “Vision of Lear” by Tadashi Suzuki and Toshio Hosokawa, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, “Succession” by Jesse Armstrong et. al, The Book of Love by Kelly Link, The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleischman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The Garden by Claire Beams, Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, and Wild Houses by Colin Barrett
Episode Transcript:
BP: Welcome to season two of The Book Maven, a literary review. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dive into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode, but first…
CB: At first, I was thinking, "Let's talk to Chris about writing a character who is not at all like you. Okay, you know, an elderly woman." But then I thought, maybe it's more interesting to talk about writing a character who seems not to be like you at all, but really is like you.
Yes. I mean, I think those are almost the same question.
BP: Thank you. Please elaborate.
CB: Um, well, you know, you always hear that old chestnut, "Write what you know." And I feel like, without meaning to, I sort of did in all of my previous books—uh, all five of them. Without really realizing it, they all kind of involve young people, semi-good-looking urbanites moving through the world. You know, that—
BP: That can't be you, Chris, because you are totally good-looking. Okay, go ahead.
CB: I did not mean to turn that into a compliment for myself. No, but just like my own age, and, um, it's sort of like these travelers, and, uh, I was actually, you know, so inspired to do Maggie that, once I got outside of myself—once I kind of stepped into the shoes of this 81-year-old, maybe homicidal widow—I felt like it was finally freeing.
I finally felt like I could reach for high branches and do wild turns. It somehow opened me up and liberated me in a way that I think I was so hemmed in by writing my own experience that it had the opposite effect. I felt like I could do so much more getting outside of myself, and that's probably because, at heart, I'm an 81-year-old homicidal widow.
No, it's… it's at heart because, uh, one, I do love... I've, you know, I think that what Calgary says, you—uh, I think when you're writing about someone who's 81, they've earned their wisdom. They're at an age where you can actually give them intelligence, wit, and a life of experiences. Whereas, when you're writing, say, like a 23-year-old, you always feel like you're making them— even though they're an adult—too precocious, or too well-lived, or too wise for their years.
And so you're kind of always holding back a little bit. Um, and yet, for some reason, it was just so freeing to write someone who was 81 because she's earned it all, you know? She can say whatever she wants. And so it was me, but in this like, free way where you kind of can speak your mind, and, uh, you give her the benefit of the doubt.
BP: This is such a turnabout to Patricia Highsmith writing Tom Ripley, uh, which is, I mean, you might be an 81-year-old woman at heart.
CB: Thank you. She might have been a 20-something gay man at heart.
BP: Uh, yes, but on… but on the other hand, as you say, in writing younger characters—I'm working on a character who is going to be aging throughout the course of a book right now.
CB: Mm. And I have been. That's—
BP: Interesting.
CB: Yes. You know, because I've been thinking about that very thing. How do I take her from age 9 or 10 all the way to 60 or 65? And how do I make sure that she is not sounding the same all the way through? So that's a real concern. However, the joy, as you point out, about Maggie Burkhart is that you can give her the wisdom and the wit and the perspicacity of someone who is an octogenarian.
BP: And of course, that also—and this is what is so delicious about Havoc—is it gives her the perspective of seeing that this child is not as sweet and innocent as everyone would like him to be. So, talk about that. Talk about how Maggie actually is able to see through this little boy's, um, you know, the easy appeal that children of his age have for other adults.
CB: Well, I think in a way, I mean, even though they're sort of at opposite bookends of the life shelf, you know, um, at the very ends of life on each side, uh, they're almost treated similarly—the elderly and the very young—because in children, because they're the person in the room whose opinions you don't listen to, or the person who's overlooked, who's just sort of blends in.
An old person or a child, you know? And they're also, uh, it's because, you know, they're not self-reliant, or they're not perceived as self-reliant. So, uh, they're these sort of characters that sort of fall into the background of rooms. And so, in a way, they're both suffering the same condition. They both kind of are lonely creatures that want to be seen and want to have agency in the world, but have none.
And so that really interests me—writing about age. And that was one of the reasons I wanted to tackle it. Obviously, it came out of the pandemic. And in that period, there was this whole conversation: do you sacrifice the old for the young, or the young for the old?
So, in a way, I wanted to sort of literalize that war between generations. I mean, this should have been a story about a sweet old lady who kind of takes on the grandmotherly role of a cute little boy. But, um, instead, it's, you know, the inverse in this crazy world that we live in.
Because I think they’re both manipulative and learn how to exploit that perception of them as sort of these half-formed beings. And so, uh, that was really fun to play with. I mean, that was really exciting to work with, on both ends of the spectrum, with, uh, Otto as much as with Maggie. And actually, I found it much more challenging to write about an 8-year-old boy than I found to write about an 81-year-old woman.
Especially an 8-year-old boy with an agenda.
BP: How do you write that character and yet keep him true to his life experience, his measure of wisdom, which is—it can't be the same as Maggie's, and yet they are, um, if you will, playing on the same field. They're trying, it's like this, this incredible, it's not even a chessboard. It's a game of Go, right? You know, they’re on different levels, and they’re crossing each other. And, you know, so he can't be the same as an adult, but he is working against an adult and with adults as his various pawns too.
CB: Right. Right. I mean, in a way, I kind of thought of it as, in the first drafts, it’s like Maggie was sort of—Even though they were enemies, nemeses—like she was sort of mentoring him in this role of just destroying lives.
And so, I, you know, it's so hard to write children for me. I don’t have any children. I’m not really around children that often. Um, I, you know, I have friends who have 8-year-olds. And so, I was paying a little bit of attention when I would come and visit to their, you know, way of speaking and their knowledge base.
But I didn’t want, I wanted Otto to be brilliant without being a 31-year-old trapped in an 8-year-old’s body. We have that child so much in literature and in films, like the precocious child that knows it all and is way too smart for their age. And it’s so irritating. It’s kind of grating. And so I wanted Otto to be really, you know, quick-witted and shrewd, but also a child.
Like, I wanted him to have these moments where he kind of breaks down like children do, or doesn’t understand the gravity of situations like children do, in the same way. And I think, you know, I kind of went back to when I was a kid when I was thinking of him. And I remember, oh my god, my class in, what, 4th grade, they were like wolves. They were like the most malicious children. We were all so horrid. So, I don’t think it’s a stretch, honestly. I think, you know, we like to think of children as so sweet and kind, but they are such cunning creatures, and they’re so observant.
BP: And that’s what he is. You need to be observant to be a great manipulator. Like both of them, you have to be observant. And so they have this advantage in a way that they’re sort of watching from the outside in rooms. And so they’re paying close attention, and they’re using that information against the people, you know? They’re studying.
When you talk about going back, and I haven't spoken to him about this, but maybe someday I'll get to speak with Amor Towles about A Gentleman in Moscow, because that is one of my favorite books set in a hotel, you know, being restricted to the walled garden kind of thing, the way you deal with Maggie.
CB: Yeah.
BP: Let’s talk about the hotel. Did you read other books before, during, or after that were set in hotels? Because I think that's really fascinating.
CB: Well, I’ve always loved hotels. I mean, just as a traveler and as a person, I crave them. I adore them. I, you know, I really, I love—
I love the fact that you can be a complete stranger, and you're in close contact with all of these other people, and somehow it's this sort of beneficent place, but you don't know anything about the other person. But you're behaving sort of on a semi-civil level.
Um, and you kind of—it’s sort of like, it’s sort of this idealistic world where the class distinctions kind of break down. Everyone's on the same playing field. Of course, everyone has different sized rooms, but it's just an amazing and very rare moment of communality between, you know, or communion between strangers that’s, of course, prime for fiction and, uh, for great writing.
Did I read any hotel novels? Um, there are, I mean, there's... you know, Agatha Christie obviously did like ultimate hotel novels. Um, you know, she was the queen of that. Because she understood that—I think she understood, like, how do you get a bunch of people into a limited space hotel?
So, you know, that must have always been an inspiration for me for this book. And also, the hotel that I based Havoc on was where she wrote much of Death on the Nile. So isn't that amazing? Like, that was a very—that’s a little factoid about the Winter Palace, which is in Luxor.
But you know, I tried—it’s so funny when—When I write about a place or an aspect or feature of something, I always try to run from it in terms of reading about it because I'm so scared of, uh, being inspired or, you know, being influenced by it. And I’m so easily influenced by things. I think that’s what makes me love writing about foreign places so much because I really just fall under the spell of them.
But I also don’t feel like I have to be careful about that because, uh, it’s just so easy to enter someone else’s world.
It is easy to enter that world and think you're writing something meaningful when all you're doing is throwing a bunch of details onto the page. You know, that's really, really tough.
BP: One more question for you. What are you working on now — the previous novel, or something completely new?
CB: Well, I want to tell you that another thing that was amazing about Havoc — unlike this book I'm working on now — is that I had the idea in one flash. I was staying at the Winter Palace, sitting in the back garden, right after the pandemic, and I saw this old American woman at a table next to me, berating a waiter about her lunch order in a way that was clear she'd had lunch there every day.
And it just came to me — the whole story came to me in one moment. That has never happened to me before. You know, famously, Patricia Highsmith said she got the idea for Tom Ripley from watching a young man walking across the beach in Positano at dawn, and I always thought that was such a lie. I thought she was just being a showwoman about it. But this is very similar. The whole story came at once, and that made it really fun to play with all the elements of it because I knew what it was. This novel I went back to... it’s about a young man in Paris, also a murder.
It's very hard to drop a novel and then try to pick it up two years later. It's like giving mouth-to-mouth CPR. You're trying to resuscitate the thing, trying to remember the initial spark that brought you to want to write about it. And so I'm kind of having trouble finding the spark again.
I hope to. I always find the first paragraphs, the first sentences... I don't know about you, but they're so important to me because that's where all my enthusiasm lies.
BP: Welcome back, readers, to another one of our Friday Read segments, where we take a few of your posts from mostly Blue Sky but other places online as well, and talk about what's mentioned. And I do this, of course, with my trusted and excellently well-read producer, Jordan Aaron. Jordan, how are you today?
JA: I'm doing well. Ready to get through some Friday reads.
BP: Excellent. So what do we have first?
JA: Up first this week is a post from Nancy Brock, who’s reading Hanif Qureshi's Shattered from Echo Books. A fall at home, a life changed, a memoir celebrating the resilience of spirit and the triumph of the mind.
BP: What a subtitle. I mean, that is a story in and of itself, just in a subtitle.
And so, this is a true old school Friday Reads post Nancy Brock put up here. Just the hashtag and the title and the information, you know, about the author and the publisher. So you might remember we mentioned Qureshi in a recent episode because I was talking about memoirs and novels and all kinds of stuff.
And we were talking about his 1980s hit, My Beautiful Laundrette, that was made into a film with Daniel Day Lewis back in the day. Qureshi is also very well known for other books, including The Buddha of Suburbia. In 2022, sadly, a sudden stroke left the writer without the use of his arms or legs. When he says a bomb went off in his life, he really means it.
It was completely unexpected. I believe he was just watching, you know, the footie on TV, as one does in England. And next he was on the floor, and I believe He can wiggle his toes, but not much else. And this memoir isn't, it doesn't reach the, I was about to say the heights, but really I should say the depths of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean Dominique Boby, which is an incredible, incredible memoir about what it's like to be locked into your body.
But It is a memoir that's really lively. It shows that Qureshi's mind is still as dynamic and incredibly filled with culture and ideas as ever. I think fans also of Chloe Cooper Jones's Easy Beauty, which is one of my favorite philosophical memoirs of the past few years, as well as Lucy Greeley's Autobiography of a Face.
Those are books that, if you appreciate, you will really love Shattered, and I am sorry to say that we have to love Shattered, but I would rather still have Qureshi's voice out there than not. So, what's next, Jordan?
JA: Up next, we've got a post from Peter Landau who says, “The most beautifully written book about a murderer I've read. In the Forest, by Edna O'Brien, from Picador USA. And he's shared a lovely piece of art depicting the author as well.”
BP: It is a beautiful piece of art. I'm like, oh, is that a painting? Is that a sketch? I don't know, but it's, it's black and white. Um, it's a line drawing kind of thing. And Edna O'Brien. Who we lost last year was definitely the grand dom of Irish literature.
The Country Girls, one of her novels, is a modern classic. I say read A Pagan Place first. I love A Pagan Place. If you know, you know that, uh, in the forest, as it's called in the UK, is based on a terrible real life triple homicide involving a mother, a son, a priest, another, it's really complicated, but it is, in fact, The perfect book if you love Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad Mysteries, and you haven't read O'Brien, this is a great way into O'Brien's work.
And if you're not a Tana French fan, maybe you loved Anne Enright's The Gathering, Louise Kennedy's Trespasses, Maggie O'Farrell's Instructions for a Heat Wave. And of course, this year's really popular Claire Keegan books, Small Things Like These and Foster. These are all Irish women writers who illuminate the experience of girls and women in that country in its decades of Roman Catholicism and how they've affected those lives.
And I think we have one more.
JA: Yeah, last but not least, we've got from Jennifer Pooley, um, who says her Friday and her Friday reads is as this quote. She'd been editing all day. It was nice to sink into the sea of words and story to get away from reality for a while, which is a quote from Death of the Author by Ineti Okorafor.
BP: I love this. I happen to know Jennifer Pooley, a longtime publishing colleague and friend, and Jennifer lives in California now and surfs almost every day of the week. So when she is talking about something to do with water or the ocean or any kind of body of water, I know that that's a happy place for her. And like Jennifer Pooley, this book, Death of the Author, is a happy place for me.
It's really, really different and it is not for everyone. The image is an eye popping book jacket. It has this Nigerian block printed fabric in the background and then a really striking silhouette of a Nigerian woman's head. And Okorafor is Nigerian. Um, she was born to Nigerian parents in the United States, but has dual citizenship.
And she's coined two terms, African Futurism and African Jujuism. And that's meant to distinguish the speculative work of African writers from that of their African American counterparts, because Afrofuturism is often used by African American writers to look into and interrogate enslavement culture and racism.
Okorafor writes speculative fiction, and like her novel's protagonist, Zeilu, the author is also paralyzed from the waist down. And what she does with this is to make a novel that really has three parts. The first part is about A paralyzed academic who is also a novelist who is really disenchanted with her life.
The second level is a speculative novel that Zalew is writing about robot beings on another planet. And then the third part of the novel is about an entrepreneur, sort of a venture capital kind of guy, who has learned how to make these very strange, hyper, realistic and hyper capable legs and arms and other kinds of prostheses for people with challenges.
This is a wild ride. It's for fans of Niecy Shawl, N. K. Jameson, Octavia Butler, Nana Kwame Adjei Brenya readers will love it, and Victor LaValle readers too. So, that's Friday Reads for this week. Thank you so much, and we'll see you soon.
BP: If you put it on loud and listen closely, you can faintly hear Edgar mourn the death of his father, the Earl of Gloucester, as I Am the Walrus fades to silence. Amidst the cacophony of John Lennon’s strange song, Edgar’s words, taken from a BBC Radio program, are immortalized in the Beatles’ discography. Of course, the Bard doesn’t need help from the Fab Four, because although experts believe King Lear was performed just once during William Shakespeare’s lifetime, since then, the play has been adapted by many important artists.
The eponymous monarch divides his kingdom in three, for each of his daughters. While his daughters Goneril and Regan accept the land, third daughter Cordelia declines, offering him her respect and affection instead. Angered by her disinterest in his power move, Lear banishes Cordelia. When he is ultimately betrayed by Goneril and Regan, King Lear seals his fate in Shakespeare’s tragedy.
Doesn’t it make sense that the Yiddish community in New York would adapt Lear several times to fit their own experiences. In 1892, Jacob Gordin wrote The Yiddish King Lear, which is believed to have ushered in the “great era of Yiddish theater” in New York City. The Yiddish Theater District was known for operetta, but with the Lear adaptation, drama became the most popular form for Jewish immigrants. Gordin came back with Mirele Efros, colloquially known as “the Jewish Queen Lear,” a version that swaps King Lear out for a powerful matriarch. It was adapted into a Polish silent film in 1912, and an American film in 1939, unfortunately neither has been dubbed for English speakers.
Since then, King Lear has been adapted musically as well: Kuningas Lear in Finnish, Lear in German, Re Lear in Italian, and Vision of Lear in English. Re Lear was written for the esteemed Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, though Verdi never actually composed any music for the opera and it went unproduced. Vision of Lear was much more successful, a Japanese-German production adapted by Tadashi Suzuki and Toshio Hosokawa, and was performed at the Munich Biennale in 1998.
King Lear made its film debut in 1910 in an Italian production directed by Gerolamo Lo Savio. It’s been adapted as a movie countless times. Akira Kurosawa’s Ran was made in 1985 and Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear in 1987. It’s no coincidence that these maestros would take interest in Shakespeare’s story at a point when both would have been contemplating personal and professional legacies. The two films do take long detours from the original source material, to be expected from such singular minds. Kurosawa’s is a must-watch for its stunning use of color and editing techniques, while Godard’s is a bit more aloof, preferring viewers to enter its world on its own terms.
It wasn’t until recently that popular fiction released its own major adaptations of the seminal piece of literature. In this millennium, Lear has twice been written as fiction, once in 2009 by Christopher Moore, whose Fool was narrated by, well, the king’s fool. In 2017, Edward St Aubyn’s Dunbar, part of the Hogarth Shakespeare Series, retold the tragedy from the perspective of Logan Roy from “Succession” or, if you will, Rupert Murdoch from IRL, a businessman named Henry Dunbar.
But the most successful literary adaptation of King Lear must be Jane Smiley’s 1991 A Thousand Acres, which places the story on an Iowa farm. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1992 and a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1992. In 1997 it was turned into a movie starring Michelle Pheiffer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Jessica Lange in 2022, the Des Moines Metro Opera premiered a version of Smiley’s novel as an opera.
King Lear’s incisive angles on betrayal, transitions of power, and control of land–the very ideas that made it relevant to early Jewish immigrants to New York–remain prescient and devastating today.
Transcript:
BP: One more set of six recs. Recommendations that I try to give six of within three minutes and otherwise a bookcase falls, supposedly on me, but I'm still, I'm still injury free. Thank you very much Jordan for that kindness. Uh, so Jordan, my producer is back and we're going to see if I can beat the clock today.
JA: All right, we're rolling.
BP: So first up, these are books about unexpected villains. The first one is The Book of Love by Kelly Link. Link's first novel. I love Link's short stories and it is so huge and heaving with plot, but it won't disappoint. It's a fantasy epic about three teens who returned from the dead.
And in this case, I can tell you who the unexpected villain is. They're still living high school music teacher who for us band nerds. That's, that's a pretty great one.
Second is the God of the Woods by Liz Moore. And this is set at an Adirondack summer camp for teenagers. You can smell the bug juice sun in an ax body spray from here, but the creepy part is that the camp is part of the Von Lahr family's hereditary Adirondacks land and the entire tribe feels like the villain. I'm not telling you who the villain is in this story, but it is one of those books where past and present intermingle in a really meaningful way.
Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser Ackner is better than her first novel, Fleischman is in Trouble, and this one is based on a real life businessman's kidnapping that Brodesser Ner found endlessly fascinating. She's got a huge question in this book. Do any of us come by any of our privileges? Honestly, again, no spoilers, but it's a gut punch ending that's tough to accept and tougher to reject.
The Garden by Claire Beams is a creepy, atmospheric take on mid 20th century fertility problems and clinics that attended to them. The main character, Irene, isn't sure if the villain is male, female, or botanical. The real shocker though is the historical truth that Beams has embedded within this gothic tale. I really enjoyed it.
Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst is a beautiful literary novel, and you would think, Bethanne, what unexpected villain could be in this book? Well, hang on a second. So the narrator is Dave Wynn, who's East Asian, and he's a London actor whose career pivots on roles playing East Asians.
His nemesis, Giles, is an all too real avatar of Tori Smarm. And as you're settling in with Dave's gentle voice and story you will find out this is another one with a shocker of an ending, and I do think that there's a villain at the end. We'll see if you agree with me if you read it.
Finally, Wild Houses by Colin Barrett is set in Ireland. It's Barrett's first novel. Nicky and Dahl are a couple who are separated by his kidnapping, and you don't really know why at first. If you think Appalachia has problems. Tour this version of Ireland instead of the one that you usually get with the Blarney Castle. The unexpected villain, in my opinion, doesn't even appear in the plot.
So there you go, Six Recs. Jordan, how did I do?
JA: Well, I heard you talking earlier about the bookshelf being a little too soft and no, so the shelf's gonna have to fall a little harder this time. We'll turn up the, we'll turn the volume up this time, uh, 3 minutes and 34 seconds. But I do have to say, I will be picking up The Garden by Claire Beams. That sounded awesome.
BP: Oh, you're gonna, you're gonna love it, Jordan. Everyone else, thank you. Look forward to hearing what you think. Well, that does it for this episode of The Book Maven, A Literary Review. Follow us on Substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more.
Talk to you next week. The Book Maven, A Literary Review is hosted and produced by me, Bethanne Patrick. It's produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenunbound.substack.com
