Selected Novels | Clare Sestanovich on Marilynne Robinson

On the second episode of Selected Novels, Jess and Zach talk to Clare Sestanovich, writer and managing editor of the Drift, about Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping.

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Transcript

Jessica Swoboda  00:14

Hi everyone. Welcome back to Selected Novels. Zach, who do we have on the show this week? 

Zach Fine  00:18

This week we're talking to Clare Sestanovich about Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, which was originally published in 1980 and has since become something of a cult classic, especially among Robinson heads. Clare was a 5 under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation in 2022 and is the author of the debut novel, Ask Me Again. Her story collection, Objects of Desire, was published by Knopf in 2021 and was also a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Clare has written for The New Yorker, the Paris Review and Harpers, and is also a managing editor at The Drift. And it was really to talk about Robinson's Housekeeping. I was telling Jess a little while ago that I actually gave my mom a copy of Housekeeping for Christmas, and it didn't go over well, but nonetheless, I still think that this is an incredible episode, and Clare was like a really, really wonderful guide into Robinson's work.

Jessica Swoboda  00:33

Yeah, and it's always fun for me, especially, to talk about Marilynne Robinson. She's someone whose work I've admired for a really long time, both her novels and her essays and Housekeeping especially. So, yeah, it was a really fun conversation, and really fun to just dive more deeply into the text with Clare. We hope you'll enjoy this episode and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selectednovels@thepointmag.com We'd love to hear from you. And also be sure to subscribe to The Point, the magazine that brings you content like this podcast. You can find a 50% off discount code exclusive to listeners in the Episode Notes. Hey Clare, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Selected Novels.

Clare Sestanovich  02:15

Thank you for having me. Very glad to be here. 

Zach Fine  02:17

Before we dive into Housekeeping, I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about Marilynne Robinson, any part of her biography that you think is salient for approaching the novel.

Clare Sestanovich  02:28

Yeah. So Marilynne Robinson, truly one of our our living greats and and happily officially recognized as such. You know, she's Pulitzer Prize winner and all that. She's 80 years old, so getting on a bit, I suppose. And you know, maybe one thing that will be helpful for us to bear in mind is that I do think of her as a, you know, voice of the American Midwest and the American Mountain West. She's born in Idaho, which is obviously where Housekeeping, maybe not obviously, actually, it's where Housekeeping is set, though, in a fictional town. And her other books, which we'll probably touch on a bit, take place in Iowa, and she's presided for a long time at the University of Iowa, MFA program, which you know is maybe worth mentioning as a prestigious badge of sorts, but but more importantly, I do think her regional specialty and specificity is worth bearing in mind and maybe also thinking of her as a teacher. I mean, I'll be curious if you guys share this feeling about Robinson or of its pure projection on my part, but you know, she is somebody who I know has loomed very large and very personally for a lot of writers in my generation, because of her position at the MFA program. You know, it feels like my admiration for her is entirely from afar and through these books, but it feels really not infrequent to hear, you know, a debut novelist say Marilynne Robinson is their mentor. And I really do, I think it comes through in the prose and also in, I don't know, maybe it's something more elusively temperamental, but I have, I have an image of her as this kind of steely, no nonsense, but somehow very warm presence. So, so I mentioned her teaching as well. And, yeah, I mean, maybe the other thing that's she has an interesting publication history. One thing to say is that she is both a non fiction and a fiction writer. I will confess that I have dabbled very little in her non fiction, and the sampling I have done, I find it rather dense and tendentious, which other people will have a better opinion on that. But, you know, I think there are people in the non fiction camp who sort of think of her as this public intellectual. She had this moment, I think it was largely because of Obama, sort of pre his hyper commodified "best of lists," he which mostly kind of anoint younger writers I don't know to these lists. He identified Robinson as a big hero of his. And I think that kind of catapulted her to this sort of, you know, master of lincolnian rhetoric. She writes a bit about American democracy, all in a kind of, like, to my mind, high falutin way. But whatever she maybe, what's relevant for our purposes is to say that she, among other things, is something of a religious scholar. She is an avowed Calvinist, which is a kind of bizarre and antiquated thing to be, and Housekeeping obviously has a lot of religious overtones and illusions and and import. So that's something we might bear in mind. But you know, she also, like in the late 80s, wrote this big door stopper about nuclear pollution, which, as far as I know, no one really reads, but she she has a lot of interests. And then within her, within the fiction camp, I sort of think anecdotally, I feel like I encounter Housekeeping fans or Gilead fans. And you know, House Housekeeping is her debut novel. It's written in 1980 and you know, my sense of the arc of the critical reception is much lauded as this very remarkable first novel. But as is the way often with first novels, a lot of people kind of thinking like, well, let's see what happens next. Um, and really, for a long time, nothing happens next. It's not until 2004 that she writes Gilead, and that is when the sort of you know, she wins the Pulitzer for that book. It seems like the mainstream attention and praise descend at that point. And that book spawned something that seems quite unusual to me, in the world of literary fiction, which is kind of a series. She writes, Gilead, and Home, and Lila and Jack, I believe those are the four. And I think it's at that moment that Housekeeping also gets this sort of renewed boost. And yeah, I can talk a little bit about how I came into contact with Robinson, but maybe that's enough background wise. 

Jessica Swoboda  07:07

No, we would love to hear how you came in contact with Robinson, and especially housekeeping when you first encountered especially.

Clare Sestanovich  07:15

Yeah. So somewhat sheepishly, I think of the Housekeeping fans as the true Robinson fans, and so I will confess that I was a Gilead fan first, and I read Gilead, yeah, I read Gilead when I was like 13, and it's not the ideal age for encountering that book. But like a lot of teenage aspiring writers, you know, I was an ostentatiously precocious reader, like desperate to read anything that had been deemed advanced. So it was very gratifying to me, actually, that people would remark that it was odd that a 13 year old was reading a book written by a 70 year old woman. And from there, I read Home, which for a long time was my favorite of Robinson's books, and it's, it's not quite right to call it a sequel, but it is. It's part of the same Gilead universe. And I guess if I'm saying that's my favorite, it potentially raises the question of why I've chosen Housekeeping. And I think one, and I actually don't recall when I first I think I read it not until college. I think I was sort of unaware of it, even as part of Robinson's bibliography. And one kind of glib answer is that I think it's a weirder book. Gilead and and co are more emphatically quiet books. And, you know, maybe that was another reason why it was weird to be a 13 year old reading it and and those are my remain my favorite books. And in a kind of, in a certain superficial way, I think the two strands of her fiction seem to be quite different. You know, Gilead is dominated by these much more conventionally, conventional seeming domesticity, and it doesn't look at first glance like it's roiled by the kind of darkness and strangeness that I think makes Housekeeping a very literally disturbing book. But I do think there are really interesting through lines in the books and, and, and maybe that's, I think it was, for that reason, kind of interesting to encounter Housekeeping second and within the framework of the of the Gilead universe. And so I think it made it all the more it's kind of this really disturbing to me when I when I read it, because it is such a bizarre and affecting book.

Zach Fine  09:45

So for someone who hasn't read Housekeeping before, can you just kind of bring us into the novel with a kind of sketch of what what happens in kind of broad strokes?

Clare Sestanovich  09:54

Yes. So I think the most important things to be grounded in as a new reader, or somebody listening to us talk about this, are the setting and then the two protagonists. So it's this, the setting really is a character in this book in such an amazing way that only someone like Robinson is capable of. But it's set in this very tiny town of Fingerbone, which is in Idaho, on this very forbidding lake, and the lake is the site of multiple familial traumas that befall the two sisters who are at the heart of the book, Ruthie and Lucille. The first, I think it's worth describing both of the traumas. The first trauma is that the grandfather, the off the page patriarch in the book he is working on a train that is passing over the lake, and the train, for reasons that are totally unknown, derails and disappears into the lake, and the greatest mysteriesis that the train itself is never found. And the second trauma is that the mother of these two girls who has fled Fingerbone for no real reason, returns and ends up committing suicide there by driving her car into the lake. And that's really the premise. So we have these two effectively orphaned children. Their father's never been in the picture, and they are then raised by different family members in variously erratic manner within Fingerbone. And the other sort of crucial character for us to have in mind is their Aunt Sylvie, who becomes their primary caretaker of a sort, so that she is a she is an eccentric, as I think they probably would have said at the time, and the book follows the the maturation of these two girls under her care or not care and and, you know, a lot of the suspense is generated by the Divergent Paths of these two sisters who respond to Sylvie's presence very differently and grow up into very different characters along very different paths.

Jessica Swoboda  12:07

So we have Ruthie as our main narrator, and I was wondering if we could talk a bit about her as a narrator, how we're meant to view her, what kind of guide she is. And I ask this especially because of a line that comes up at the end and it says, "All this is fact. Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation." And that was a moment at the end that got me to pause. Wait. Ruthie, what have you been doing and saying, and where have you been leading us, this whole, this whole novel?

Clare Sestanovich  12:38

Yes, no, if we were in the, you know, freshman seminar talking about this class, probably the first thing we would talk about is the unreliability of this narrator. But it's a very it's a particularly interesting type of unreliability because it's self consciously, self-awarely unreliable. Ruthie is very interested in the limits of her own subjectivity. And although this is a book that's narrated in the first person throughout, it doesn't deviate. Well, except for maybe a couple interesting formal things. It doesn't deviate from the first person. And yet, it's, it's so preoccupied with the question of point of view. And you know, it's also maybe important to point out that it's a retrospective narration. I think another one of the engines of suspense in the novel is that we are reading to find out where Ruthie, the character in the book, who is, you know, a tween, I guess we would say, where she ends up in life, like, where is she narrating this story from? And it's a it's a retrospective narration that is itself fascinated by the effects of retrospection, you know, and the ways that it can warp a story and warp it. But warp isn't quite the right word, because, as the quote that you picked suggests, Ruthie is a character who, like, basically, doesn't believe in the concept of the real. I think that's not too extreme to say. You know, the porousness for her between fantasy and memory and reality they're blurry to begin with, I think, but they get blurrier and blurrier as the book goes on. So there's a kind of compulsiveness I feel to the narration, this obsession with the past and with turning over the past, and then a kind of like recursive obsessiveness about the obsessiveness so it you know, she's an exquisitely competent narrator, in many ways, because, of course, it's also Robinson doing the narrating, but her grasp on reality is very tenuous

Jessica Swoboda  14:55

Yeah. Can we turn to the passage you selected? Because I feel like this captures the narration, really, really well.

Clare Sestanovich  15:02

Yeah. Should I read it? 

Jessica Swoboda  15:05

Yes, please. 

Clare Sestanovich  15:06

Okay, great. So this is a passage fairly early in the book. And yeah, it follows Ruthie and Lucille. "Sometimes we used to watch trains passing in the dark afternoon, creeping through the blue snow with their windows all a light and full of people eating and arguing and reading newspapers. They could not see us watching, of course, because by 530 on a winter day, the landscape had disappeared, and they would have seen their own depthless images on the back, on the black glass, as if they had looked and not the black trees and the black houses or the slender black bridge and the dim blue expanse of the lake, some of them probably did not know what it was. The train approached so cautiously. Once Lucille and I walked beside the train to the shore, there had been a freezing rain that glazed the snow with a crust of ice, and we found that when the sun went down, the crust was thick enough for us to walk on. So we followed the train at a distance of 20 feet or so, falling now and then because the glazed snow swelled and sank in Dunes and the tops of bushes and fence posts rose out of it in places where we did not expect them to be. But by crawling up and sliding down and steadying ourselves against the roofs of sheds and rabbit hutches, we managed to stay just abreast of the window of a young woman with a small head and a small hat and a brightly painted face. She wore Pearl gray gloves that reached almost to her elbows and hooped bracelets that fell down her arms when she reached up to push a loose wisp of hair underneath her hat. The woman looked at the window, very often, clearly absorbed by what she saw, which was not but merely seemed to be Lucille and me scrambling to stay beside her, too breathless to shout when we came to the shore, where the land fell down and the bridge began to rise, we stopped and watched her window sail slowly away along the abstract arc of The bridge we could walk across the lake, I said, the thought was terrible. It's too cold. Lucille replied, so she was gone, and yet I remember her neither less nor differently than I remember others. I have known better. And indeed I dream of her. And the dream is very like the event itself, except that in the dream, the bridge pilings do not tremble so perilously under the weight of the train."

Jessica Swoboda  17:26

So why choose this passage?

Clare Sestanovich  17:29

Yeah, I mean, maybe just to start at the level of the prose and the texture of description, I think I mean, it's so vivid and precise, and there's a kind of hyper realism almost to it. Robinson, to me, is the sort of writer who is conjuring images in all their specificity. And I think, at the same time, maybe in part for rhythmic reasons, there's something hypnotic and totally dreamlike about the passage. Certainly it's there in the substance itself. And that tenor permeates the whole book, which you know, as I say, is about that porousness between reality and unreality, and the way those supposedly distinct categories interact. And you know, this particular moment is, is proof of that porousness, right? Like the straight facts of what happens here that you see a stranger through the window of a train, can't possibly convey its significance to these two characters. And you know, obviously the significance of the woman in the train. It's impossible not to associate her with the absent mother in these in these two girls lives and so, you know, and this woman, in her unreachability and her sort of obliviousness to them, I think, stands in for that absence. But at the same time, it's not the mother or the mother's stand in that feels most resonant to me in this scene. It's the longing for her and the sort of space that exists between people that is most evocative. And there's a way this book is really moving to me in the way it describes the kind of secondary experience of loss in which you begin to forget a person who has died, and Ruth Ruthie and Lucy will experience this later on in the book, but and Ruthie, in her narration, she's very attuned to the way that the erasure of a person, in that way, does not erase the imprint of their loss, and in some ways, their absence becomes more real the further they recede into memory. So there's something I don't know I Robinson, especially in this book, but maybe in all of her books, is so attentive, I think, to the experience of loss like grief, is obviously such a complex experience in and of itself, but for Robinson, it really feels like only the the very first emotional strata that that she's probing. You know, there's there's the anticipation of loss, there's the aftermath of loss, there's the experience of losing other people, alongside the experience of losing oneself and then, and I think maybe this is what this scene sort of conjures most poignantly. For me, there's, you know, obviously great pain and loss, but there's also a kind of desire that it evokes that can be a sort of thrill. You know, this is a little mini adventure that these girls are on in this scene, even though it is a kind of heartbreaking one.

Zach Fine  20:44

It was something I was struggling with reading in terms of kind of landing on a singular tone, like the way that you're talking there about the way that thrill is yoked to loss. Do you find the novel, novel in general, to be like if it had one master kind of tone would it be haunting, dreamy? Is it is there something, or is it a little too knotted and kind of complex to be distilled into one kind of general feeling?

Clare Sestanovich  21:08

Oh, I think the instability of the narration is so crucial that it isn't quite possible to sum up. You know, for example, this is, this is a much stupider question that the one you raised. But the question of like, is Ruthie happy at any moment in the book or in the place that she is narrating from is, I don't know. I wouldn't even know how to begin answering it. It sort of instantly dissolves in trying to reckon with it. And I don't know. Maybe it is a tension that exists in works that are so beautifully written that it is possible to read this novel kind of just being captivated. At least it's possible for me being enthralled by the beauty and precision of the prose and just the images that are unfurled on every single page, and it can it's almost like you get kind of lulled out of perceiving just how tragic the lives of the characters are. And I don't know, I think that Ruthie herself is, you know, she's sort of an avatar for the reader. In that way, she's really captivated by the beauty of the world, but all of it has this great mournful undertone. But maybe they're inextricable for her, I don't know. 

Zach Fine  22:31

I also wanted to go back to kind of the freshman English class, and I know this is a question that might be a little kind of too glib and simple in some ways, but when I think about the novel in my mind I think about the lake, and I think about the train. And I'm wondering, what those in particular the lake in your mind, what is that a repository of in the novel? What does the lake--I know it's a very over determined image, but what do you kind of think about its function in the novel? And you know, what is it to you? 

Clare Sestanovich  22:58

Yeah, I mean, I think that this is maybe where I would suggest we think about Robinson as the religious writer that she is, because there obviously are connotations with all site types of water in this book, of a renewal and cleansing and a kind of baptismal Association. There's lots of talk of Transfiguration in the book. And I think there's a real preoccupation with a question of what kind of change people are capable of over the course of a lifetime, or multiple lifetimes, because this is a book that is curious about intergenerational trauma, as we would say now, I suppose. But also, you know, I mean, it's a lake, not a river, not an ocean. It's a it's a stagnant body. It is a body of water that is often, and I haven't mentioned this, yes, but it's often completely frozen over. And so there's also a sense of things being frozen in it and trapped in it. It's where, you know, memory gets preserved, but also swallowed up. I mean, the combination of renewal and destruction that are represented in the lake is puzzling to work through. You know, it is it at times the lake functions as a site of, like, literally, a site of union and and joy. In the novel, the two sisters go there and and it's, you know, a sort of escape for them, a refuge and a place of intimacy and a world unto themselves. But it also is a real menace in the book, and it represents death and tragedy and the kind of inevitable demise that Lucy feels is headed their way. And there's a line at some point where she says, "I cannot taste a cup of water, but I recall that the eye of the lake is my grandfather's, and she's never met her grandfather. He's not an actual character in her life, but in the world of Ruthie, that is utterly irrelevant, and in some ways, he is all the more real for having never been present. So I think the the lake is a repository for all that confusion between, you know, past and present and real and unreal, and it somehow becomes, in Robinson's hands, the perfect symbol of all those seeming paradoxes. It all kind of makes sense on the lake.

Jessica Swoboda  25:33

You mentioned earlier Ruthie being very attentive and drawn to the beauty of her surroundings and the everyday. And now you were just talking about Robinson as a religious writer, and one thing I noticed throughout the novel is just how she elevates the ordinary, and kind of gives the ordinary this transcendent type of property. And there's this line early in the text where it goes "so the wind that billowed her sheets announced to her the resurrection of the ordinary." And so one thing I'm wondering about is, can we understand this resurrection of the ordinary separate from the religious background of Robinson, the religious undertones of some of her writing, or is it something that we can understand as separate and drawing attention like no, the ordinary, the everyday, is something that should be elevated, that can be elevated, and it doesn't need that religious context to see that.

Clare Sestanovich  26:29

Yeah. I mean, ordinary is a word that appears countless times in this book. And just as an aside, you know, I am a writer myself who, in the process of revising, can become almost sort of fetishistic about trying to weed out repetition. And it's reading somebody like Robinson where I realized, like, oh no, you just have to embrace the repetition. This is the beauty, the pleasure and the puzzle of this book is, you know, how many times can you use the word transfiguration in one book? You wouldn't think it's possible, and it actually, it somehow only adds to the effect in our hands. But yes, I mean, maybe this is a good moment to talk about the title a little bit, which is, you know, Housekeeping evokes basically the opposite novel of what this is. It's sort of domestic bucolic, ordinary, simple, cloistered, stable, whatever. And I think that maybe what strikes me as the source of Robinson's interest in the ordinary is its potential for change. You know, housekeepers of the conventional variety, of which Sylvie and Ruthie are not, are very preoccupied with, you know, maintaining order and a semblance of stability in the sense of stasis. And I think you know Sylvie throughout the book, she loves things that perish. You know that there's one scene where she keeps a curtain that has burned like half of it has burned, because it's kind of an evocation of something beautiful and happy for her. And she loves, you know, fragile, delicate flowers and totally impractical shoes. And it's really offensive to Lucille, the younger sister in the book, who you know, talks at some point about invidious change, that the possibility of things not being solid and reliable is is threatening to her, is terrible. And I think there is a kind of the appreciation is, is for the way that common things inevitably dissolve. They dissolve because they're they are common. They're not memorable. They're not they're not monuments, they're not memorabilia. They can perish, and it's only in the perishing that they have the potential to become something else. And as to your question about, you know, do you, I mean, this isn't quite what you asked, but like, do you have to be interested in Christianity to appreciate some of the stuff in this book? And I think, emphatically, the answer is no. I think this is a book that is about, like, the nature of belief as such. And, you know, she's interested in this process of Transfiguration, which is, of course, related to resurrection and has, you know, is maybe most powerfully evoked by religious stories that some of us, if not all of us, are familiar with. But it is also totally ordinary. You know, there's a whole passage in the book where she's kind of retells Jesus's story as if he's just a regular guy, which, of course, is exactly what he is. So I think it is. It's fundamentally the regularness of religion and the way that belief and doubt are absolutely mundane experiences. That is why Robinson's interested in them. And you know, none of the characters in the book seem explicitly religious or spiritual, but they do have a real appreciation for these themes, which are at once kind of like inherently religious and just, you know what it is to be a person walking through the small woods at a small town.

Zach Fine  30:29

You're talking about the novel and the title Housekeeping. I was thinking there was a moment where Sylvie's style of housekeeping is described as accumulation, or the essence of housekeeping for Sylvia's accumulation, and I'm and just the way that the different characters are compared in terms of their approach to housekeeping and I'm wondering if you've any thoughts about what that does for the novel in terms of why, why set up these contrasts with different methods of maintaining a house, and whether reproducing its cleanliness or hoarding or whatever it is., what does that do for the kind of the plot or the structure of the novel? Why is Robinson so attuned to those kinds of styles of housekeeping? 

Clare Sestanovich  31:10

Yeah, well, one thing we haven't talked about yet is the fact that the crucial part of Sylvie's identity is that she is what's called in the book, a drifter. You know, she's been traveling on the rails. She's been going from one city to another. She is somebody who has no particular mooring in the world. She doesn't have a home. And so there's an interesting tension between the idea, you know, she has all these behaviors that are described as transient behaviors, you know? And she has this interest, as I've described, in the kind of ephemeral in life, things that can perish. And so her interest in accumulation is in some ways totally at odds with that, right? But I think it does capture the very fundamental need for belonging that even somebody like Sylvie, who is not grounded in any way, in any sort of recognizable domestic way, has. And, you know, I think the novel follows the kind of disintegration of the house in a lot of ways, without giving any total spoilers. But it is, you know, it's going to seed. It's Sylvie is, in some ways, I guess we could effectively just call her a hoarder. She keeps lots and lots and lots of stuff. Hoarders should be branded as, you know, accumulators in Robinson's language. But it is, I don't know. I think it all kind of is a setup for her renunciation of it, and that in this book, like opposites are always coexisting. And so I think accumulation is it's a response to loss. It's also an anticipation of loss. There's not anything that feels especially solid or comforting about the nature of stockpiling that Sylvie does, if anything like as you're reading about it in the novel, you feel it is, there's a kind of foreboding that builds that can only it's sort of a setup for being utterly cleansed, I think.

Zach Fine  33:24

Can I just ask quickly if you if there's a character novel that you particularly identify with and identify, I don't mean in terms of your personality, but there's one you feel like you just most strongly have a kind of an attachment to?

Clare Sestanovich  33:35

Yeah, Ruthie, for me. I mean, she, we've talked about her as being erratic and unstable, but I in spite of all the strangeness of who she is, yeah, she's sort of endlessly resonant to me as a character and the way she feels very caught between the different forces in her life. You know, she has Sylvie, this aunt that she feels deeply drawn to, but also is, like, entirely aware of how, you know, there's a line where it says something like, clearly, our aunt was an unstable person. I mean, she's at no moment deluded to the strangeness of Sylvie, but she also, you know, doesn't really have anything else. Her sister, who has been her sort of sole companion throughout life, is increasingly remote to her. And I think there is something brilliant about the way that Robinson is even in this very extreme instance of loneliness like Ruthie is somebody who does not have an anchor in the world, but it feels, at the same time like an entirely relatable form of loneliness. I don't know if you two felt that, but it feels like she's she's capturing something very essential about the fundamental solitude of life, like we are all going through it alone. 

Jessica Swoboda  34:55

Yeah, I definitely felt that way about her. I find her endlessly fascinating. And want I find myself as I'm reading just wanting to get to know more about her, and wanting to see things as she sees them, and understand that perspective. So yes, I do. I also just captivated by her. In what ways, if at all, did Housekeeping influence your own writing, especially your novel, Ask Me Again?

Clare Sestanovich  35:21

Yeah, you know, I was thinking about this because I do think of Robinson as being a very profound influence of mine, but I don't entirely know how I mean, in some ways, it's just this, this standard of excellent pros that you know, you've always got to try to be one quarter as good as Marilynne. But I think her interest in, as I've already said, in sort of the possibility, but also the dangers of change as a person you know, and maybe most specifically, you know, this book follows two sisters who change in very, very different ways. And you know, to say that they become estranged is not to fully capture what transpires for them, but they just end up in entirely different worlds. And my novel is about two people who have a kind of inexplicable connection, but who really diverge in ways that are painful and hard to understand for them. And so I'm interested in that process of, if not exactly, estrangement, detachment from the people who early on in our life we form these very meaningful attachments with. And you know, maybe the other thing that feels most significant to me is Ruthie is as a lot of protagonists in literary fiction are, but you know, she's a consummate observer. She is attuned to everything around her. And more than that, she is so attuned and so sort of almost trapped in this role as witness that it comes at the expense of being a an actor in her life. She does have a passive, you know, drifting quality. And I'm interested in the ways that like observation, which is such a literary quality, both of writers and of many writerly characters, is at odds with action and sort of characters that feel stuck or swept along by forces that they don't understand or can't control. And so the protagonist of my novel is, is a character in this vein. And you know, to go back to the passage that I chose at the beginning, it's, you know, it's very easy with you imagine two girls racing alongside a train, you know, desperate to try to make eye contact with somebody inside. You know, it's very tragic. It's of course, wouldn't you rather be in the cozy interior of the train than in the icy, cold outside? But at the same time, of course, there is this real privilege in being the person on the outside looking in, the person who is seeing without being seen. And I think that the kind of power that's inherent in certain type of witnesses or observers is also something that I was exploring in my book, which is narrated by by this young woman who feels who I think is very attentive to the world around her, but struggles to find a kind of foothold in it. So in that sense, Ruthie, I think, is a is an inspiration for a certain type of literary protagonist.

Jessica Swoboda  38:53

You used this phrase earlier when describing what Robinson's doing, and it was, she's grappling with the nature of belief as such. And then you're were also just now talking about the possibilities and dangers of change. And I was reminded of this line in an interview for Electric Lit that you did about Ask Me Again, and you said, "I hope this is a book that gets people to think about beliefs, where they come from, how they change, what they feel like, which is very different from a book that gets people to believe anything in particular. Novels can do that, of course, change people's minds, but I think they do it best when they do it subtly, not strenuously." And so, why is the novel such a good medium for getting to people, for getting people to think about their beliefs? Why is it, yeah, a good medium for us to grapple with those types of questions. 

Clare Sestanovich  39:41

I mean, I think because of the ways that it very truly immerses you in somebody else's mind, like there is no better way to appreciate how fragile but crucial the nature of belief is right is to see the beliefs that somebody else holds, and why they might have them, and what sort of effects they have on the rest of the world. So the novel's capacity to just get inside the head of another is, is unparalleled, I think. And you know, it doesn't always succeed, but this book is, is certainly a success, I think, in, in just making us feel so submerged, actually, as maybe the right kind of watery metaphor for it, in, in Ruthie's psyche and the, you know, there is a real like, it's funny to think about, what does Ruthie believe? Because I think she's, there's actually a moment in the book where she and Sylvie are they're walking alone, which is not their habit. And Sylvie says something like, Well, what do you think? And Ruthie says, I have no idea. And she calls it a confession, a sort of confession of her invisibility. And I think, I don't know, in some ways, there's nothing more powerful than you know, not just showing what somebody believes, but showing what it's like when somebody doesn't know what they believe. I mean, that's the kind of the texture, the psychological texture, that is most impressive, because it's very hard to capture something like ambivalence or be like the actual felt experience of not knowing something and not having any idea what your life is about, what it will supposed to be about, where it's headed. And you know these two girls who have no you know they're in such a stark situation of having no sense of stability and no kind of inherited conviction. But I do think all of us, or I hope I'm not the only one who feels that kind of, you know, sense of foundering and really profound doubt a lot of the time. 

Zach Fine  41:53

At the very beginning of the conversation, you talked a little bit about Robinson's role at the University of Iowa at the MFA program, and how there's a kind of long tradition now of people studying with her and her influence in American fiction. And so this kind of question about institutions, something that I've wondered as I was reading Objects of Desire, but also Ask Me Again, you worked at The New Yorker for many years, which is one of the major institutions in the United States for the transmission of literary fiction, and I'm curious what the influence of the New Yorker has had on your own writing, or none at all? You know what how you think about its its role in your fiction?

Clare Sestanovich  42:33

Yes, no, it's good that we talk about institutions in a book that is all about characters who you know have have no place in them, and are, you know, individuals at odds with the institutions in society. It's a good question. I mean, you know, I grew up reading the New Yorker. I admire so many of the writers that it's published. I am, I'm not an experimental writer. You know, there are times when I wish I were more that way. But, and, you know, people who dislike the New Yorker fiction section, I think, have a notion of it as being a very cookie cutter or, you know, there's a certain there's such a thing as a New Yorker story, which I resist. I don't think there is, but I do think there are certain conventions and styles that trickle down and that have certainly influenced my own writing. You know, I think as far as my own experience there and its influence, I think it has much more to do with the kind of day-to-day experience of editing and being surrounded by editors, and less about a particular institutional identity. I don't think that I will always be an editor and a writer at the same time, but I do think that they are two different hats that have really, I don't know, they interact with one another in really interesting ways, and I do, being part of the collaborative part of writing, which is, you know, easy to overlook in our kind of fetishizing of writers in rooms of their own and hard at work on the solitary work of genius, is that that collaboration has been really and the importance of it has been really imprinted on me through my my editing work. And you know, collaboration is what institutions at their very best can do. 

Zach Fine  44:19

So one of the reasons that Jess and I started this podcast is because we're very excited to hear writers choose their favorite novel from the past, but we're also interested in the state of contemporary literature and fiction and the novel, in particular. Having written your first novel now and looking ahead, what are some of the kind of constraints you feel going forward? Or what do you feel is kind of possible or exciting for you, alternatively, in terms of fiction right now and what you'd like to be writing? You know, I'm just curious how it feels to be a writer of novels right now, today, in 2024.

Clare Sestanovich  44:58

it's a very hard question. Um. Yeah, I I'm a writer who, in a very fundamental way, like doesn't think that my writing matters, and I don't entirely know what I mean when I say that, except to say that the sort of doubt about the importance and the efficacy and even just like the beauty of my work is a truly constant undertone to everything that I do. So I think my best hope for feeling excited and energized is turning that doubt into something that feels productive but I don't, I don't know. I don't take for granted that, like I will continue writing, that people will continue reading my writing, that it will, I think maybe in the Robinsonian experience, I do have a kind of abiding faith that it will change, whether I want it to or not, and that that sort of change will be a positive force, even if it means, you know, I never write again, or something that's also a change, that's the transfiguration. So I think I do feel hopeful that some kind of like unnamed change will transpire for me and make you know my next book, something that feels meaningful, but it feels like a huge unknown to me and kind of unanswerable.

Jessica Swoboda  46:28

Well, Clare, thanks so much for joining us again. It's been great to talk to you about Robinson's novel as well as your own. We're really grateful. 

Zach Fine  46:35

Thank you so much, Clare.

Clare Sestanovich  46:36

Thank you so much. This has been a pleasure.

Jessica Swoboda  46:43

Thanks everyone for joining us for this episode of Selected Novels. We'd like to thank John Trevaskis for editing the podcast and contributing the original music. As always, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and please subscribe to The Point. There's a discount code for listeners in the show notes. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selectednovels@thepointmag.com. We'd love to hear from you. Until next time, listeners.