[p. 3 of 4]

[Lipsyte continues]... the writer did a lot of research. There's a whole school of those books and I think that's a bit of a problem with contemporary fiction in that a lot of people turn away from "the now." There are writers who say, I can't really write about the way the world is now because it's too confusing and fluid and strange so I'm going to research the hell out of a strange thing that happened in 1850 when this dye was invented and a plate for daguerreotypes or something.

Shteyngart: [laughs] I don't know if you've read the recent V.S. Naipaul piece in the Times Book Review...

Lipsyte: I didn't.

Shteyngart: ...in which Naipaul and another essayist talk about how only non-fiction can keep up with real time. I'm simplifying it a bit here...

Lipsyte: This is something that Philip Roth said in 1961 or whenever he wrote that essay, Writing American Fiction. The 9/11 novel is annoying in a way, but at least it's people trying to wrestle with it.

Shteyngart: And I don't think it's the pace of events, I think it's more the technology. Something happens in the morning, people expect to have it analyzed on a blog by four. The novel is a lumbering beast by comparison.

Lipsyte: Well, I don't think that's the job of fiction.

Shteyngart: Is fiction still relevant?

Lipsyte: I guess it's about what kind of scale you're interested in. I read something once about the screenwriter Robert Towne, who wrote Chinatown. He was talking about the golden age of Hollywood up until Watergate and Vietnam and all that. Before those events, the Hollywood movie was rooted in a certain idea: America is basically good; there's corruption, but we can root it out. The system itself is a good thing and the narrative was built around that assumption. And then, after Vietnam and Watergate, everyone still agrees, but now everyone agrees that everything's fucked and the system itself is rotten. You have your anti-heroes, but basically everyone's still on the same team.

The problem is that after that period, everyone became dispersed and everyone's in a different niche, so there are no common assumptions. I don't think this precisely applies to literature, but I do think it's an interesting point. So people talk about the novel being dead—it's not that it's dead, it's that the novel is no longer necessary to a lot of people.

People no longer have to fake reading books the way they used to. There's no basic assumption from which to work from anyway. So, very urbane, literate people talk about video games at cocktail parties. That's the new Dickens—it's Halo.

Shteyngart: [laughs] But should we be making value judgments about Halo? And I'm not just saying this because we make our living writing fiction...

Lipsyte: Well, a lot of people we revere as giants were marginalized in their own time, so I don't worry about it too much. I remember I opened up a copy of The American Mercury and there was a little capsule review of the new William Faulkner novel... talk about snark! It was "Someday William Faulkner may write a good novel, but he needs to discover a sense of humor first..." or something like that.

Shteyngart: I agree!

Lipsyte: I think what gets people upset is the expectation that large amounts of people will be wrapped up in their vision. It still happens, though. A lot of people read your book.

Shteyngart: Eh...

Lipsyte: It still happens. But in a way it makes you work harder, because readers aren't automatically jumping on the new novel of the month.

Shteyngart: What's strange to me is that fewer and fewer people read, and yet more and more want to write. Look at the proliferation of MFA programs, for example. Maybe it's a part of our self-obsessive culture. It's like the credo of The Subject Steve: "I am me." There's more concern with self-expression than there is in trying to connect with another person, than trying to hear someone else's words.

Lipsyte: I think that's absolutely true. There's a lot of interest in just "spiritual creativity "and "unlocking your inner narrative voice" and so on. People are interested in writing a journal and then turning that journal into a memoir. A Romanian philosopher wrote about how the Roman army really entered its decadent phase when everybody wanted to be in the cavalry. They had to outsource to get foot soldiers because all of the sons of Rome had their dads buy them nice horses so they could be these fine-looking cavalry officers. Everyone wants to be a writer, nobody wants to be a reader. And it's not just that. It's not just cultural developments, it's, you know, a painter uses paint, but we use language and so does everybody else. And so people look at you and think, "Well, I can do that." Somebody makes a really nice chair—unless you're trained in woodworking, you don't think, "I could do that."

Shteyngart: Home Land is a very Bush-era book. To quote from it "We think that we're not fat and that we're a nation." Where do we go from there?

Lipsyte: These characters are [high school] class of '89.

Shteyngart: As were you?

Lipsyte: No, when I was writing it, I made the characters a few years

[continues...]