Selected Novels | Bruce Holsinger on Stoner

On this episode of Selected Novels, Jess and Zach talk to the novelist and English professor Bruce Holsinger about John Williams’s Stoner.

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Transcript

Jessica Swoboda  00:15

Hey, everyone, welcome back to selected novels. So Zach, who do we have on the show this month?

Zach Fine  00:20

On this episode, we spoke to Bruce Holsinger about John Williams's cult classic Stoner, which was published in 1965 and reissued by New York Review Books in 2006. Bruce is a professor of English at the University of Virginia and the editor of New Literary History. He's the author of several academic books on the literature and culture of the medieval world, including On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age, which was published by Yale University Press in 2023. He's also published five novels, most recently The Gifted School, The Displacements, and Culpability, which is out this month from Spiegel & Grau. 

Jessica Swoboda  00:33

We really enjoyed talking to Bruce about Stoner and Culpability. We're excited for readers to have a chance to dive into Culpability this month. If you have questions or comments or anything else, you can always send an email to selectednovels@thepointmag.com We'd love to hear from you, and please be sure to subscribe to The Point, the magazine that brings you content like this podcast. There's a 50% off discount code exclusive to listeners in the Episode Notes, so check that out.

Zach Fine  01:39

Hi, Bruce. Thanks so much for joining us on this episode of Selected Novels.

Bruce Holsinger  01:43

Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Zach Fine  01:46

So for your novel you chose John Williams's Stoner, which was originally published in 1965. Can you tell us a little bit about Stoner?

Bruce Holsinger  01:56

Yeah, so Stoner is a kind of call it a dark, pretty bleak novel about mostly about one man named William Stoner, who grows up on a dirt farm in rural Missouri, goes to college, and then he gets this break and goes to college at the University of Missouri. Stays there for his masters and his Ph.D. He spends his whole career teaching there, by hook and crook. He marries and has a child. It's the marriage is as bleak as his whole life. And then he, you know, he spends his whole long career at Missouri and never gets promoted beyond assistant professor, and then dies. It's a novel, and you describe and you think you know, who would read that and who would love that, but it's a novel that's kind of inspired this cult following, especially since it was reissued by the New York Review of Books some years ago, and it inspires kind of fierce devotion. And it's, it's just a novel that's so, uh, I've never read anything like it, and I'm definitely in its cult. And it's a novel I think about, you know, I come back to it every now and then I'll reread it. I've written about it before in my scholarship, and I find it appealing on so many levels. One reason that I like it so much, and maybe this is something that we can talk about during our time, is that Stoner is like me, a medievalist. And this is one of the passages I want to talk about in the wake of his death, his colleagues donate a medieval manuscript to the library. He writes his dissertation on medieval lyric poetry. And he, you know, is really deeply devoted to early literature, but his medievalism is of a particular flavor. The novel has all kinds of historical resonances, thematic literary resonance. This is a very meta literary novel in some ways, even though it's written in this quite unstylized, third person, simple past, kind of a close third person, but also a rather distance third person, and it just sparks all in all kinds of directions. 

Zach Fine  04:14

For me, I think a lot of people encounter Stoner in kind of isolation, without the rest of Williams's body of work, and I'm wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about John Williams, about what else he produced, and kind of what he's he's known for.

Bruce Holsinger  04:29

Yeah. So I am no expert on Stoner, and when I saw your prompts for the podcast and knew you had asked me about this, I, you know, I just did a little bit of reading. And the most helpful piece that your listeners, if they're interested in Stoner's life and work, would be a Leo Robson piece from the New Yorker in 2019, so I'm cribbing a bit from him here, just so you know. But he had a life that tracked Stoner's life in some ways. He was born also on a farm and this was 1922 not in Missouri, like the Stoner in the novel, but in Texas. He served in the US Army during World War Two, unlike Stoner, who did not serve in the war. And that's an important part of the novel. I think he published his first novel Nothing but the Night. That was in 1948 a few years after the end of the war. And that's a kind of urban, noirish narrative. It's about a troubled high school dropout. He's alienated from his dad, his life. He commits these acts of violence. He has this awful reckoning at the end. And then Williams went to the University of Denver on the GI Bill. He got his bachelor's and his MA there. He went on to the University of Missouri, like Stoner for his PhD in English, before going back to Denver to join the faculty, and he stayed there at the University of Denver for the rest of his career. He directed the creative writing program for a while. He put together some anthologies. He wrote some poetry himself, but he was also an anthologist of early modern poetry. That was his special. He specialty. He was trained as an early modernist. His dissertation was titled, The world and God: the Poems and Dramas of Folk Greville. And Greville was this kind of minor Elizabethan poet and courtier, rough contemporary of Shakespeare and Marlowe, Sydney and so on. And Williams said that, you know, there was not a good general study of Greville that had been published since 1903 and so, to his credit, there was now another one. Then, you know, soon after that, he got to work on a second novel, Butcher's Crossing, which is a kind of, I love Butcher's Crossing. It's kind of an anti-Western. It's about buffalo hunters. And there's parts of it that weirdly remind me, I think he might have been inspired a bit by Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, which is a story of revenge and almost like a proto-Western in itself, in a way. And that novel got a pretty good reception. In 65 is when he published Stoner, his third novel. That's the one we'll be talking about. That's the one that made him more well-known now after the NYRV reissue. It was his most admired book was Augustus, actually, it was a historical novel set in ancient Rome. It won the National Book Award in 1973, the co-winner that year was John Barth, and he finished his career at Denver, died in 1994 so he published those four novels. I believe he had a posthumous novel that in fragments that have been published, and all of the novels that are very, very different from each other. You have this urban noir. You have Stoner, which is a dark academic novel. And at the beginning of dark academia. Butche's crossing this, this weird Western. And then Augustus, you know, classical historical novel, and it was widely acclaimed and and recognized with the big novel prize that year. So that's a sketch of his life. He's, you know, he never went down as one of the great American novelists. But I think this novel Stoner, I feel like more and more people read it every year. Every couple of years, there's a piece or a podcast on why we need more people need to read Stoner, where it's almost at a meta Stoner point where you know more people need to read about people reading about Stoner and saying more people need to read it. But it's, I think there are reasons for that, especially among academics. It's kind of a fan favorite, especially among academic guys. It's definitely a guy's novel. And you hear guys recommending to each other, this is the best novel you ever read, often when they're stoned, even though the title has absolutely nothing to do with pot. Sadly. That it is a yeah, again, I'm a member of the following and aptly so.

Jessica Swoboda  08:45

So why don't we turn to the passage that opens the novel? There's a part of it that you especially wanted to talk about, but I'm wondering if we could just read that whole opening paragraph?

Speaker 1  08:56

yeah, or maybe the first two paragraphs, they're short, great. Yeah, you want me to go ahead and read him for you, please: "William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910 at the age of 19. Eight years later, during the height of World War One, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same university where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses. When he died, his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University Library. This manuscript may still be found in the rare books collection bearing the inscription presented at the library of the University of Missouri in memory of William Stoner, Department of English, by his colleagues. An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. And Stoner's colleagues who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive speak of him rarely now. To the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones, it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers in years. 

Jessica Swoboda  10:23

Yeah, dark. I also, every time I reread this opening, I'm moved to laugh like that's my initial reaction, and I it feels bad that that is my reaction, but we're just repeatedly told of his mediocrity and his lack of success. But then yet, he still loves literature. He remains attached to it. It's the thing that survives amidst all his interpersonal breakdown, really, of his relationships. And so, yeah, I'm wondering, like, Why? Why did you want to discuss this passage in particular?

Speaker 1  10:54

Well, it's just, I think it's one of the bleakest openings, but it also could, and I agree with you. It could be the beginning of an academic satire, right? It reads like that. And you think, okay, is this going to go the way of David Lodge, or, you know, James Smiley's Moo? Is it going to be one of the great kind of satirical send ups of academics? But it, but it doesn't go there. Instead, it kind of goes way back, and then immediately it takes us back 20 years earlier, to the farm where Stoner was born. But one of the other things I love about the passage is the narrator, right? So the narrator, this is being told in past tense, but the narrator is in the present, an occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder, ideally, who Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity. They speak of him rarely now, right? So there's the now, when this is this is being told. So we're looking through this, this telescope back at the life of this man, the small life of William Stoner. And so it's a kind of magisterial passage, and the book has this similar magisterial style where it deals with the passage of time and the kind of rhythms of the world, the rhythms of the individual, in these kind of conflicting ways that I think are fascinating.

Jessica Swoboda  12:21

Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. I've read this passage now three times, four times, and had never noticed or paid much attention to that slide, but to the present, and it's almost then this novel is this way of, kind of bringing attention to the scholar who goes unnoticed throughout kind of his entire career and his entire life. And so I do find that interesting. 

Speaker 1  12:44

And he gets, he is noticed by his you know, he's not noticed by the people who will help him get ahead later, but he is noticed. You know that, you know you brought up love and attachment, Jess, and the first person who really notices that is one of his teachers, right? And and it's Sloane who says, you know you're in love. It's as simple as that you're in love with literature and, and that really strikes Stoner, you know, he falls in love again with his future wife, Edith, later, that doesn't work out so well, but his true love is literature. But that, that love never quite translates into success, but it's there, yeah, it's really poignant.

Jessica Swoboda  13:11

Like through that love. Is this novel making some sort of statement on the intellectual life, or, you know, use about it? I don't know, yeah,

Bruce Holsinger  13:31

Yeah, because he's not, you know, he's not going out and doing a whole bunch of scholarly papers. He's not publishing much. You don't see a couple chapters with he's having drinks with friends at the MLA. You know he's, it's not that kind of career. So it is devotion. It's, it's deep love of the matter in front of him. And he tries, but he's also not a distinguished teacher. Now, you could imagine he goes a different way. Okay, he doesn't publish much. He stays an assistant professor throughout his career, but God, the students just loved him and revered him. But that's not who he is, right? So his own love for literature is so internal, and it's so you know, he has these epiphanies as he goes through the novel, as do we, but they're minor epiphanies. They're kind of desultory epiphanies. 

Zach Fine  14:17

I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more about how this breaks from other conventions in the campus novel. You mentioned Lodge, for instance, and you know, certain expectations that are set up in the opening paragraphs. But are there other kind of signatures in the book that really set it apart from other works in the genre? And you said at the very beginning that it was a kind of a dark academic book, or maybe a pro proto dark academia kind of book. I'm just wondering how you think about it in terms of genre?

Bruce Holsinger  14:52

Yeah, you know so much, so many campus novels. And I'm just answering this off the top of my head, because I hadn't really thought about it are about rivalry, and they're and they're about, you know, the protagonist is often someone who can get in there and scrap with the best of them, right, even if they you know, I'm thinking of the Shakespeare Requirement, or Dear Committee Members, or Small World, you know, Morris Zapp. You know, winning all the fights like Stanley Fish, right is who is based on and you have, yeah, you have James Smiley and Moo, where the, you know, the woman who's , you have this incredible administrator, basically Assistant to the President, and I think who's, who's running the place. And there's a kind of light heartedness, even in the darkest academic novels, there's a light heartedness to administration and playing the administrative game. And Stoner loses it from the very beginning, he just, he can't do it right, and he's he doesn't know the right moves to make, whether it's going off to war or, you know, volunteering for the right committees. He's just continually thwarted his whole life. And you know that that passage at the beginning, there's no there's no arc, right it? There's no kind of triumphant or even tragic arc. It's just this kind of flatlining. And that's the the whole novel. And yet, I can't put it down, even on repeated readings. There's some something about the way that he, he manages suspense that I've never been able to understand, a kind of this rhythm. I don't know if it's a prosaic rhythm to his sentences or what, but it just, it just throttles you with the sadness and the stasis of it, if that makes sense. And speaking of stasis, maybe also, you know, oh, maybe, could I share another passage, please, please, please, of course. Okay. So one of the the important things to know is that he's, you know, this is um World War One is breaking out. His two friends, his two good friends, Finch and Masters, they enlist, and Stoner has to make this decision about whether he's going to enlist. And Finch, who ends up being a kind of Arch Enemy later, is trying to talk him into it, assumes he's going to do it. You know, you've got a choice to make. You're you know, you better enroll, or you better enlist, and Stoner finally decides not to. What he does instead is he stays at Missouri for his Ph.D., and then you get this incredible passage. "He's told them goodbye, turned away. They go to enlist, but Stoner had classes to prepare for the following week. He felt no guilt for his decision, and when conscription became General, he applied for his deferment with no particular feeling of remorse. But he was aware of the looks that he received from his older colleagues, and of the thin edge of disrespect that showed it through his students, conventional behavior toward him. He even suspected that Archer Sloane, who had at one time expressed a warm approval of his decision to continue at the university grew colder and more distant as the months of the war wore on. He finished the requirements through his doctorate in the spring of 1918 and took his degree in June of that year. A month before he received his degree, he got a letter from Gordon Finch, who had gone through Officers Training School and had been assigned to a training camp just outside New York City. The letter informed him that Finch had been allowed in his spare time to attend Columbia University, where he too had managed to fulfill the requirements necessary for a doctorate, which he would take in the summer from Teachers College there." And then he also learns that his friend masters had died. And then that's basically the war, right? So the war is essentially him hearing from his friend, Finch, who's getting a Ph.D. at the Ivy League, in the Ivy League while he's back at Missouri. Then he hears the other friend died, and that's how the that's how many years pass, right? So it's this incredible compression, where we have this tight friendship on the eve of the war, then boom, the war. The war takes a couple paragraphs.

Jessica Swoboda  19:04

Yeah. Is that meant to kind of show how absorbed he is in the literature to for like, that's the world in which he's living in, or what are you supposed to make of the that short period in which.

Speaker 1  19:17

it's it's a little bit. Yeah, I think it's partly that, that he's absorbed in in the subject, but that's also when he meets his, his future wife. But there's also, I kind of have a theory about Stoner in general, and I think that, um, that passage, and how he how he dodges the war without, without being a draft dodger or anything. He just decides against it and goes in a different direction. And I really think Stoner is a great cold war novel. It's it's it is avoidant, while playing out these kinds of conflicts in the life of stoner himself. Of this kind of minor heroism. And I think the medievalism, in some ways, is medievalism is a kind of token of the Cold War aspect of the novel, where the, you know, thinking of the the Middle Ages, the study of the Middle Ages, that's a way we can disengage with the world and not be responsible to the world. And that's the way these institutions, kind of, you know, contain any, any sort of dissent. So I read the novel as a kind of allegory or parable, I guess, of Cold War medievalism. And Stoner is a kind of perfect example of that.

Zach Fine  20:37

That's really interesting. So it's not, you don't see it as a, kind of like a moral kind of vacancy or a apathy, but like a kind of minor form of resistance that he's, you know, you know, in a kind of Cold War setting, projected

Speaker 1  20:51

A little bit, yeah, and it's not, it's not like Siegfried says, it's not pacifism, right? It's not the the intellectual kind of deciding that the war is immoral. It's the intellectual deciding, not for me, I'm going to do my Ph.D. instead. And it's and it's not even cowardice, because in some ways, doing his Ph.D. is actually more frightening of Stoner enlisting, at least that's how I read it. So it's just very complicated, and that's and the way he, you know, the Sentimental Education, Flaubert. Do you guys know that novel? That where we're also this is kind of floating around through the significant events of the day, which are and there's always just this kind of near miss, and that's how this novel fears, it feels to me. 

Jessica Swoboda  21:36

 You've mentioned a few times his relationship with his wife, but I'm also hoping we might talk about the affair that he has as well. Yeah, in some ways it feels I was mad that it happened. I was like, of course, there's this cliche coming in that professors of a certain generation are having these affairs. I'm like, but what, it has to be there for a reason. And I'm wondering what you make of that moment, what you make of that relationship, and why? How could I read that differently than I do, which is just from a point of frustration?

Bruce Holsinger  22:12

Well, like everything else, his affair is something that he just falls into, right? And that's not an excuse, that's not a justification, but even the language that Stoner used, that I'm sorry, I always confused, that Williams uses to talk about how the affair begins, it's something like and so he had, so he experienced, or so he had his love affair, or something like that. And the not, he has this feeling that creeps up on him, and he she's a kind of opposite to his wife, you know, she's certainly friendlier. And it's, he just gets caught up in it, and it changes his personality a little bit. So I guess it is a cliche of the campus novel, but maybe it's, you know, Stoner's cliche or something, I don't know. Yeah. What do you think?

Jessica Swoboda  23:03

I, yeah, again, I can't read it other than like, this is just Yeah, I like the idea of he falls into it, but I also just think, oh, it's, it's what is expected. It's what's on the path that he's on. It's part of the this life of a professor, a professor in that era. I don't know. That that's a very ungenerous read and a very, very much a read from me, coming from this point in time of academia, looking back on academia of the past. So that's, that's why I asked, because I'm like, surely my read is not a generous one or the right one. So, yeah.

Bruce Holsinger  23:38

Well, also, you know, he, Stoner, is a kind of bad theorist of love, too. And he he thinks about love. You know, when he's young, what is he thinks of love is this kind of transcendent state, absolute state of being that you maybe you'll get there sometime. I think he calls it love a false religion later in the novel, once he has his affair and he kind of knows that these things are, are fake, even, you know, you just have to pretend to worship and and you're a devotee. And it's, it's not a state of grace, it's not an illusion. It's, it's something else. So he's, you know, he has his own kind of theory of love that I'm sure he gets through. You know, his dissertation on, on, basically, love lyric in the Middle Ages, and the influence of Latin classics on it. And he's, you know, so he's getting all that stuff from, you know, I'm sure Williams did his homework, getting that stuff from your Platonism, from, you know, the poets in the Middle Ages and and kind of reveling in that as a lens not just on his love of reading, but his love, his kind of dark, foiled love of his wife, which is a humiliating kind of love, right? And then his love of Catherine, and his love of his child, all of that just kind of foils his attempt to come up with a single coherent theory of what love is.

Zach Fine  25:03

Even though Williams himself is a scholar of literature, I'm wondering, is there any element here where he's kind of wagging his finger a little bit and saying like, these are the perils of of trying to experience and pursue love through literature, through a life of reading. Or do you not sense that kind of warning?

Bruce Holsinger  25:22

Oh, I hadn't thought about that. That's interesting. I know, you know, I don't, for the most part, there may be passages I'm misremembering. He rarely holds up a piece of literature as a lens or a mirror onto the situation is like, there's rarely a kind of didactic correspondence like that. I may be wrong. I may be because I didn't go back and read it all the way through. It's a novel I think I know so well, but it always surprises me. So there may be something in there like that.

Zach Fine  25:56

Can we turn to the final passage that you selected, and can you set it up for us and tell us what's happening and then, and then read it, please?

Speaker 1  26:05

Yeah, so, so Stoner, here is he's he's lying on his his deathbed, and he's looking back on his his career as a teacher and intellectual. And what he always wanted to do is he wanted to give his students some kind of wisdom and integrity through the literature, some kind of the you know, the qualities that he thought he himself had found in in the literature of the English and classical traditions. But it's it's facing in the moment of his death that the lack of that, and this is how it reads. "And he had wanted to be a teacher, and he had become one, yet he knew, he had always known, that for most of his life, he had been an indifferent one. He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire. He had found compromise in the assaulting diversion of triviality, he had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years, he had found ignorance. And what else he thought? What else? What did you expect? He asked himself. And then, you know, in the in the bleakest moment, it's, you know, he, he's looking around for his book. He grabs his own book, the only book he ever published, with its familiar red cover. It hardly mattered to him that the book was forgotten, that had served no use. He opened it. He riffles through the pages, and then his fingers start to tingle, and he dies. He couldn't see what was written on the page. His fingers loosen and the book they had held moved slowly and then swiftly across the still body and fell into the silence of the room." And in that moment of his death, right his just like the novel opens with the manuscript that's being donated in his memory, the book closes with his own book held in his hands, but he can no longer read it, and the narrator, in this kind of crushing moment, leaves his head right? We're no longer in we're now in a kind of omniscient narrator who, because he can't see anymore, the fingers loosened and the book they had held moves slowly and then swiftly across the still body, and the book falls into the silence of the room, so that you know it's almost like this, the spirit is leaving him and narrating the still body on the on the bed.

Zach Fine  28:30

In your article about Stoner, you have a phrase that I've been thinking about a lot, which is "the nightmare of irrelevance shared by all academics," which I think is an amazing phrase, and self explanatory, a little bit, yeah, self explanatory. But could you talk about that a little bit? This passage, the nightmare of irrelevance, yeah?

Bruce Holsinger  28:54

And it's not just the relevance of your scholarship, but it's the relevance of your teaching, right? You know, there's a there's a point where, I guess, if you're, if you're lucky enough to have a long career in academia, where you, you've published a lot, you go back and look at something. I was just rereading this article that you just cited, and I thought, I wonder if anyone's ever read this, right? And it's, it's a perfect example, like, what, you know, I could go look and see if it's cited, I guess, but I spent a lot of time on it, and I, I've spent a lot of time on all of my research over the years. And so you often wonder, are there ever going to be more than a couple people who read this? If two people footnote it, is that enough? And a lot of people, I, you know, a big part of me, would say yes, of course. But then there's also that worry, like, is this all there is? Is it? Why do we spend much, so much time churning out these different readings? What relevance do they have? And I guess teaching, we worry about that too, like do my students from twenty years ago remember Beowulf? Are they, and even if they do remember Beowulf, does that matter, right? So we I think every profession probably has this kind of anxiety, but academics like to think about it and talk about it more. So I see that passage as a kind of wonderful little distillation of that ubiquitous worry among academics about irrelevancy. 

Zach Fine  30:21

Do you think that has something to do with the kind of cult afterlife of the novel now? And you know, something Jess and I were talking about was just wondering if the reason the novel has had the second life is because academics were so attracted to this feature of the novel that it speaks to their own anxieties of that irrelevance, and so they feel more inclined to read about read it and write about it and talk about it to the public. But maybe that the the public readership for this novel is actually kind of smaller, and the only reason I say that is because I meet people from time to time who think this is the most annoying novel of all time, that they're that they're like mind numbingly boring, and I love it, but I'm also like, okay, maybe this is, yeah, the readership for this is actually very small.

Bruce Holsinger  31:07

Yeah, oh no, I'm sure you're right. And we, you know, we like to inflate those things. But just like a lot of literary fiction, you know, it may have, you know, 10,000 readers is a lot, and so that. And I think it's so it's partly that, but it may also be a bit of shutting for it. Like, boy, that poor fuck. Look what he did. He just grew up in Missouri on a farm, went to the University of Missouri for his bachelor's, stayed there for his MA, stayed there for his Ph.D., stay there as an assistant professor, and, you know, the whole so some ways you can look at it and just say, God, whatever I'm doing, at least it's not that, right? So maybe it's the great schadenfreude campus novel.

Jessica Swoboda  31:50

Yeah, if make you it makes you feel better about your maybe small success. The two people citing your article, perhaps.

Speaker 1  31:57

Exactly like damn two people, that's great. Yeah, exactly, yeah. 

Jessica Swoboda  32:00

More than stoner at least, yeah, yeah. So you have a novel, a new novel, called Culpability, yes, about AI ,that grapples with AI. And I'm wondering, I guess, the first question, though, is, has Williams, has Stoner, influenced the way you approach your fiction at all?

Bruce Holsinger  32:19

Not at all. I don't, I don't think so. Yeah, I my first two novels were historical novels. Probably, I probably wrote those before I read Stoner. They were published in 2014 and 15, and I think I first read Stoner, probably 2016 17. So, you know, it's fairly, a fairly recent love, um, and so yeah, I would, I would say, No, it's a different kind of style. I tend to write in a very close first person, a third person, sometimes first person, as in the case of Culpability. So I don't, yeah, I wouldn't say he had an influence on my style.

Jessica Swoboda  32:57

Okay. And then I guess what inspired you to write a novel that grapples with AI and all that comes with it.

Speaker 1  33:06

Yeah, so I you know this novel was inspired at the beginning by a setting. It was during COVID and our family, we were kind of wanting to get out of town. It was that first fall, and we rented an Airbnb down on the Northern Neck of Virginia. And there was this, we were this little house on a cove, and went, I went out kayaking, and the houses around there, I don't know if you've ever been, very modest, um, it's a kind of ram-shackly area. And I went kayaking out past this point, very much like the one in one of the early chapters of the novel. And there was this kind of compound where the landscape had been raised, at r-a- z-e-d,, there were tennis courts. There was this big renovated farmhouse, kind of this really cheesy looking lighthouse, fake, you know, fake lighthouse. There was a guard tower. And as I was kayaking back, a helicopter landed on the helipad, and these people got out, and I'm like, What is this? This is we are not in the Hamptons, like, who has a helicopter out here? Um, and it just seems so weirdly out of place, and and AI had nothing to do with it. It wasn't even in my mind when I started, but it somehow, unlike my other novels, which usually start with a premise or a character or a moral arc, this one really started with the setting, and and then it was only a few years later when I started to get a little bit obsessed with with AI and this new kind of tech culture that that this story started coming together. And I just it was really like, okay, thinking about a juxtaposition of two families that were staying in these two houses, and what were they, and who were they. So I had, I was working at two separate layers, I guess, with the novel. Oh, interesting when it started.

Jessica Swoboda  34:46

Yeah, your your recent novels, especially Gifted School, Displacements, now Culpability also seem to really explore the intricacies of family dynamics. Why is that a preoccupation of yours? Yeah? What, what draws you to exploring that? 

Bruce Holsinger  35:03

Well, I really once, once I wrote The Gifted School, I realized I'd kind of stumbled into a sweet spot that I really love writing about, which is just messed up contemporary families mingling with other messed up contemporary families and across generations. Because I really like writing across generations, and the opportunities that that gives us and and so, yeah, I think it's just the psychological lenses that you get on people and screwy marriages and relationships and petty jealousies, also, you know, throwing families into different kinds of crises and catastrophes. In the case of The Gifted School, it was, you know, families competing to get their kids into a school for exceptionally gifted children. In the case of The Displacements, it was about climate displacement of a seemingly affluent family. And in the case of Culpability, it's about a family reckoning with the aftermath of a really horrible accident that is, if not caused by at least, implicates artificial intelligence and auto drive and machine learning and algorithms. And so it's having families in contemporary, generally affluent families, middle class, upper middle class families in the United States in our moment, grappling with with contemporary issues and flash points.

Zach Fine  36:31

I feel like there's a question often asked of scholars and literary critics who double as novelists about how they kind of see these two things relating to each other. And I'm curious how, you know, looking back, almost kind of a little meta, about how your relationship to that kind of question has changed over the years, about whether there was a certain way that you were answering it, you know, maybe 10 years ago, and now the way that you're thinking about it is different, that you've kind of settled into your into your fiction, and you're writing it. This is your third novel, correct?

Bruce Holsinger  37:03

Fifth. Sorry, yeah. So it's a great question. And yeah. So I think when I first got that was like, you know, these are two separate parts of my brain that writes fiction and then writing my academic work, and then they, I wouldn't say they've merged in recent years, but certainly now, after writing fiction for so long, when I go back to my academic writing, I'm much more critical of my own prose, and I I now want to be telling a story. In some ways, I even think of like agonism. I think of who's a protagonist, you know, who's with, what story am I telling? If this is a manuscript I'm writing about what is the story, and I like being able to write that way. And when I go back to my early academic writing, I can wince sometimes at the obscurantism and really hate the way I used to write. Now I'm very I'm pretty comfortable. I write fiction more now than I do academic work. But, you know, I finished a book a couple years ago about parchment, the history of parchment and animal skin, and that was a long book that took me a long time, but going back to it and doing the right through at the end, I feel like my fiction writing, my propensity for narrative and character and so on, really helped me tell a much more interesting story in that book.

Jessica Swoboda  38:20

Okay, Bruce, I have to ask. So The Gifted School features these really talented soccer players, and now Culpability features a scholarship lacrosse player at Carolina. And I'm like, is this inspired by your own sons at all? Kind of what I appreciate the athletes being present? I think I

Bruce Holsinger  38:40

know you do, yeah, very prominent athlete, yeah,

Jessica Swoboda  38:44

but I, my heart goes out to Charlie and oh, I know in culpability, yeah,

Bruce Holsinger  38:49

yeah, I'm sure, well, yeah, I there's a little auto biography in there. I was, I spent many years as a kind of obsessed, psychotic soccer dad to two very talented soccer players who ended up playing Division One soccer. And I was just, I wasn't one of those people who would scream at a ref or opposing parents, but I wanted to. And I, you know, I had that kind of clench jaw anxiety about it. And I, you know, I drove them all over the east coast to play and and so I recognize that in myself. And I think, you know, The Gifted School, not so much Culpability, where I had some distance on it, but The Gifted School was, I was writing when that was at its peak, and I was it was a kind of way of working it out. I see that now in retrospect, I didn't understand it at the time, but I was kind of working out some of my own embarrassment at my own parenting, I think. And so it was very helpful to have this character, Beck, I think that was his name. It's three novels ago, this obsessed soccer dad do all these ridiculous, embarrassing, fringy things to further his son's soccer careers. And I can look back on it now and laugh at. Um, and I think it was just a little bit of therapy.

Jessica Swoboda  40:03

I love that. Well, I'm really excited for people to read Culpability. I'm still kind of thinking about the moves of the book and kind of the high points plot wise and where we end. And it's made me question my own thoughts and relationships to AI. Did writing the novel change your thoughts or perspective on AI?

Bruce Holsinger  40:26

Yes, I didn't really have any thought, you know, I had no position on it when I first started writing it, and and now, yeah, I, you know, the great thing about a novel is you you use it to explore different moral approaches to things. And so this novel doesn't take a position, but it does, maybe it is asking us, one of the takeaways is it's asking us to take a beat, look at this, the role and influence of these forces in our that we call artificial intelligence, a very sloppy phrase, I think, for a lot of different sorts of technologies in our lives, and slow down, be cautious, step back, and the main character, one of the main characters, Lorelei, is the main protagonist, Noah. He's the first person narrator, but his wife is the real force of the novel. She's this brilliant, MacArthur Genius award winning expert in the ethics of artificial intelligence. And so we look through the novel at her career, at her profound worry about what these technologies are and what they're doing, her implication in some ways, in them. And so we get a real moral lens through her. And so I was using her voice and her lens on the world to refract those questions.

Jessica Swoboda  41:42

Yeah, she was, she was such a compelling character. So, yeah, I am really excited for this to hit shelves and for people to dive into it. Yeah, thank you so much for joining us. It's been, it's been great to have you. 

Bruce Holsinger  41:53

Oh yes, an, absolute pleasure. Thank you, Jess.

Jessica Swoboda  42:01

Thanks everyone for joining us for this episode of Selected Novels. We'd like to thank Joe <oss for editing the podcast and John Trevaskis for 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.