Carla Jean Whitely’s interview with me, “Judith Claire Mitchell: The Links Between Family and Fate” went live today on BookPage. It’s the cover story, so look for it at y
our public library where it’s distributed free of charge.
All posts by Judith Calire Mitchell
Review: The Hollins Critic
I’m very grateful to the novelist, poet, and literary critic Kelly Cherry for this review. The review is not available online or at very many news stands or libraries, though you can download the issue of The Hollins Critic that includes the review here for only $2.99.
The Hollins Critic
Vol. LII, No. 1 Hollins University, Virginia
February, 2015
A Reunion of Ghosts. By Judith Claire Mitchell.
New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2015. $26.99
I have been searching for a single adjective with which to describe Judith Claire Mitchell’s second novel. Stunning, amazing, brilliant, splendid are all accurate, but not accurate enough. I want an adjective that will encompass a funny book about the Holocaust. A funny book that is about the Holocaust and the nature of time. A funny book that is about the Holocaust, the nature of time, and causality or the absence of causality. Not to mention that it’s also about love and loneliness. You see my dilemma. But it’s my dilemma, not the author’s. The author has found ways to bring together contradictions we might have expected to fly apart. Her novel exists as a rare unity, and rather like an Ethiopian wife bearing river-washed laundry, she balances it all on her head.
Albert Einstein and his marital problems turn up here, but I have to point to physicist Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle to discuss what Mitchell has wrought. The complementarity principle states that phenomena can have mutually exclusive properties, the prime example being an electron, which may be both wave and particle. But the principle outgrew its initial referent and became the notion that a field, or subject, is always adjacent to another field or subject we tend to block out. Not blocking out what is there is what the complementarity principle reminds us to do. We must take in the whole. We must see it, and understand it, as a whole. Hence, humor; hence, tragedy. Hence, now; hence, then.
For the novel travels back to Germany and Poland, to two world wars, to the chemist who developed the gas, Zyklon, that would be used in the wars, and in crematoria to murder Jews, Gypsies, gays, and political dissidents, particularly but not exclusively Communists. The chemist’s descendants include the three sisters who tell their story in this novel. “How do three sisters write a single suicide note?” As the collective author tells us, “The same way a porcupine makes love: carefully.” One of the pleasures of Mitchell’s book is a cheeriness that may function as a whistling in the dark but always presents itself first as wicked good humor.
The three sisters live in their deceased mother’s rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive. They are Lady, Vee (for “Veronica”), and Delph. They are short and curvy with bushy hair. Extremely bushy hair. Big boobs, big butts, big hair, but small overall. For the most part, the trio prefer their own company to that of others. They are acutely aware and ashamed of their mutual ancestor, the chemist, and the rampant history of suicides among their forebears. They also accept at face value the biblical passage that states, in both Exodus and Numbers, that “the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generations.” Lady, Vee, and Delph are the fourth generation.
Despite—or because of—these grim and, as Freud would have said, overdetermined realities, the sisters can joke, dance, comfort one another, and, for better or worse, stand steadfast to their truth.
Is it everyone’s truth? No. But we read this emotionally involving, masterfully structured, intelligent novel to learn about the characters’ truth, not ours. Though, in the way of Niels Bohr, A Reunion of Ghosts invites us to examine our own truths. What is good? What is evil? What do we owe to history? What do we owe to others? To ourselves? These are questions we must try to answer. Too few novels raise them. This novel, raising these questions, will be for many the first step on a journey to wisdom.
And the adjective I was looking for? Sapient.
— Kelly Cherry
Jo Walker on the UK Cover
Jo Walker designed the “yellow clouds” cover of the UK edition of A Reunion of Ghosts. Here on the 4th Estate blog my British editor Lettice Franklin asks Jo about her inspiration for both the front and back of the jacket:
How did you first go about thinking about a cover for A Reunion of Ghosts? ‘While I was reading the book, I was struck by the description of the gas that Lenz Alter invented. For me, the gas is the origin of the Alter family’s bad luck and I felt that it needed to be the focus of the jacket.’
Did you consider any other designs? ‘Initially, I tried working the sisters faces into the clouds but then decided it over-complicated it, I also tried using the elements on the family tree but again, it just didn’t add anything a
nd felt it needed quite a graphic, simple jacket.’
Tell us about the yellow clouds. ‘On the jacket, the three purple clouds represent the sisters and the main yellow cloud is the past that has a hold over them. An abstract idea I know, and it’s a bit of a leap, but to me it made sense! I’m hoping somebody out there will read the book, turn the jacket over and go ‘oooooh’ (I know this is a lot to hope).’
Tell us about the suicide tree. ‘In the manuscript, Judith put in a chart of who committed suicide, how and when, and I found this immensely useful when I was reading the book. I thought it was such a great idea that I wanted to incorporate it in the jacket somehow. Putting a chart on the back would’ve interfered with the back cover copy so I need something simple that would represent it. The family tree with symbols did this perfectly.’
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PEOPLE Magazine’s Book of the Week!!
What do Britney, Celine, and I have in common? Well, nothing, except that our photos all appear in this particular issue of PEOPLE Magazine where A Reunion of Ghosts is the book of the week. I’d say thanks a million, but given PEOPLE’s readership of 46.6 million, that would probably seem meager. So just a big thank you for this honor. And another heartfelt thanks for including me in an issue that does not have a Kardashian on the cover.
Pub Day(s)
It occurs to me that I posted nothing on 3/24, the official publication date of A Reunion of Ghosts. And today, 3/26 is the official pub date of the British edition. Friends in London and Ireland–maybe you can celebrate my pub date by visiting a pub.
Publication day is a funny thing. Many bookstores have already been selling the book for a day or two. It’s a bit too soon for reviews (if, indeed, there are any reviews in the offing–fewer and fewer novels get any). No matter how buzzy the pre-pub roll out, the likelihood is your book will not win awards, break sales records, or be made into a movie (which for some reason we all think is the best thing that can happen to a book–to be turned into something that isn’t a book).
The nicest thing about Pub Day for me–and it was, indeed, incredibly nice–was the support and well-wishes from friends and family. I’m planning on holding on to that experience, trying to cherish that outpouring, and let it inspire me to tackle the next thing, whatever it is.
I think it’s important to remember that completing the book–seeing the project through and doing it the way you want to and as best as you can–is the goal. To quote Frank Conroy, my teacher and mentor, The project is nothing; the process is everything. Tonight, at my launch party, I plan to celebrate the process. And then, I have a lot of student work to begin reading.
Express to Milwaukee
I’ll be reading at Boswell Book‘s in Milwaukee on April 1. I’m so looking forward to this; Boswell is one of the best independent bookstores in Wisconsin.
And, actually, my plan is to do more talking–about the historical figures in the book and how I went about writing it–than reading. I think it will be a fun event and my hope is that the audience and I can have a conversation about writing.
Here’s what Express Milwaukee says about the book and the reading.
Powells Essays: The Book That Refused to Write Itself
Q&A on Deborah Kalb Books
It’s not news to anyone who follows Deborah Kalb Books that Deborah has one of the most erudite–and beautiful–book blogs out there. Here’s just one of Deborah’s Qs & my corresponding A. The full interview is here.
An excerpt:
Q: The idea of a family curse is central to the novel. What intrigued you about that, and how did you create your three “cursed” sisters, Lady, Vee, and Delph?
A: Often in fiction you want your characters to be a bit larger than life. For example, I’ve corresponded a bit with a great-granddaughter of Fritz Haber, and she seems to be a kind, thoughtful, and rational person who is curious about her ancestors, yes, but isn’t obsessed with them. This is a good thing. No one wants to live a life that’s fodder for a novel!
But Lady, Vee, and Delph Alter are novel fodder. They were created for the express purpose of propelling the novel along. If I’d written them as three ordinary women with nothing more than a hobbyist’s interest in genealogy, they would not sustain 400 pages of narrative.
To make my points, I needed my characters to feel personally implicated in the mass killings their great-grandfather both wittingly and unwittingly caused. I needed them to feel personally endangered by the pattern of suicide that began with their great-grandmother.
Their interest in their lineage had to emerge not from reasonable and rational curiosity, but from a terrible and somewhat irrational sense that they carried an inherited burden of guilt and shame.
The weight of our pasts, how difficult it is to break free: that’s something the book explores. And to write about that weight in a compelling and dramatic way, I needed it to hobble my characters.
A mere genetic proclivity toward depression or even suicidal ideation, possibly treatable by some Zoloft and talk therapy, was not going to do the trick, not if I wanted the novel to be compelling and to address complex and intractable issues. There needed to be something cosmic about the sisters’ burdens.
When I did the math and realized they were the fourth generation of my Alter family, that’s when I remembered the Biblical injunction—the curse!—and that’s when I wrote the first paragraph.
As to how I created Lady, Vee, and Delph, I need to confess that while I’ve been making it sound as if every step of my process is carefully thought-out, a series of realizations and understandings, that’s really just a convenient way of talking about the process.
The more complicated truth is that my intellectual understanding of what I’ve done on the page almost always comes after I’ve done it—sometimes long after. Sometimes I don’t think it through until I’m asked questions like these!
In short, while I’m perfectly aware that I created Lady, Vee, and Delph for the purposes I’ve been describing, I’m not sure at all how I did it. It honestly feels as though they just showed up one day, pushed me out of my chair, sat down at my computer, and took over.
Or to put it another way, I believe that much of my work takes place in my unconscious. While I’m consciously struggling with point of view and doing research and writing bad sentences, my unconscious is doing a lot of the more difficult work.
In the case of Lady, Vee, and Delph, by the time they made their way to my conscious mind, they were pretty much fully formed. My job then was to get them to come to life on the page via the most difficult and important part of writing a novel—the part Hemingway called “getting the words right.”
Read the entire interview here.
The Prosen People
The Jewish Book Council not only wrote a generous review of A Reunion of Ghosts, but they also invited me to be a Visiting Scribe on their The Prosen People site, which was an honor and pleasure. The charge was to write three essays having to do with Jewish or literary matters. Here’s what I came up with:
“I’m Telling Everyone”: Ruminations About Coming Out Jewish in Less-Than-Welcoming Environments. This essay includes reference to this song.
“Some Thoughts About Autobiographical Novels”: Two questions novelists are often asked are “Do you write by hand or on a computer?” and “Is your book autobiographical?” I write on a computer. The other question is answered in this essay.
“Bagels and Groucho”: Another question I’m often asked is why I think it’s okay for a novel about suicide–and chemical weapons and war and diaspora and AIDS and random gun violence and terminal illness–to contain humor. I try to answer that here. And I refer to the poem “Tattered Kadish” by Adrienne Rich.
Library Journal Q&A
Q&A: Judith Claire Mitchell
By on March 19, 2015
Three middle-aged sisters, suffering hardship and heartbreak, decide to end their lives at the close of 1999. Gathered in their ancestral New York apartment, the sisters trace their collective family history, looking into the life of their brilliant but repressed maternal great-grandmother and their great-grandfather, a Nobel Prize–winning chemist whose invention is used to deadly effect during World War II. In A Reunion of Ghosts (LJ 2/1/15), Judith Claire Mitchell has written a darkly humorous and poignant study of a very odd family haunted by what they believe to be their cursed past.
Your novel is narrated by the three Alter sisters in a collective first-person voice. What were some of the challenges of using this unusual technique?
That was something I definitely fretted about. There are, of course, many wonderfully effective books that use first-person plural—Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides comes immediately to mind—but I know readers often find voices other than first- or third-person singular to be gimmicky and even annoying. I tried writing from a variety of perspectives, but I kept coming back to the “we” voice, which seemed the only way these enmeshed women could tell their story. My biggest challenge, then, was to make the collective voice feel like an integral part of the sisters’ story, as opposed to a whimsical choice on my part. My hope was that if the story was couched as a kind of letter, readers would accept the voice. Letters, after all, are written in the first person; a letter signed by more than one person would naturally be in the first-person plural
Another big challenge was always remembering that I was writing about people who were writing about people. What I mean is that every scene had to be written as if the sisters were writing it. Every scene had to be filtered through the sisters’ collective sensibilities and every scene had to reveal something about the sisters as well as about the people in the scene. This sort of dualistic point of view is something Alice Munro does brilliantly and, it appears, effortlessly, but it gave me fits
The three sisters, sharing the belief that the Alter family is cursed, set out to write a memoir/suicide letter. But each sibling comes to learn that the curse may not be as defining as she thought. Without giving away any plot points, was there the temptation for Lady, Vee ,and Delph to explore a different path?
Very much so. It’s hard to discuss without revealing or even hinting at what ultimately happens, but for much of the writing process I genuinely had no idea whether all or some or none of the sisters would go through with the suicide in the end, and as I wrote my way toward that end I was always stopping to consider pretty much every path and permutation possible. But when I finally got to the place where I had to make a decision, the decision seemed obvious. It was as if each sister knew the precise path she’d take, and my job was simply to describe it. I don’t mean to sound all woo-woo; I just think that a lot of this work takes place in the unconscious, which means, when it finally bubbles up to the surface, the author is often as surprised by the ending as anyone else.
What was your inspiration for your insightful, masterly work?
Way back in 1975 I read E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. It was the first time I’d encountered a novel that blithely incorporated historical and fictional figures as a means of writing not only about the characters themselves, but about decades, if not centuries, of American history. It was engaging and profound and harrowing and damning and often funny. You could tell Doctorow had done extensive research, but that he’d also had the courage and verve to throw facts to the wind when it suited his story’s purpose. For me, this was incredibly inspiring, and Ragtime has always been a touchstone as I’ve slogged my way through my own books.
Where the suicide note idea came from, I’m not sure. All I know is that for years I walked around glumly telling people that I was working on a book that would never be published because who wants to read a 400-page suicide note. Claire Wachtel, my fabulous editor at Harper, proved me wrong…thank goodness!
Your novel is not only a family story but a meticulously researched work of historical fiction. How did you develop the character of Lenz Alter, the sisters’ great-grandfather?
Lenz and his wife, Iris, are based on the German Jewish chemists Fritz and Clara Haber. Fritz Haber is often called “The Father of Chemical Warfare.” Far less is known about Clara. In fact, in 1999, all I could find out…was that she was one of the first women to earn a PhD in chemistry [and] that she killed herself in 1915 after denouncing chemical warfare as barbaric, and that, as one source said with respect to her place in history, “her life and death were pushed aside.” I was still working on my first novel, though, so I back-burnered the Habers, which turned out to be useful because, as time passed, more information about them was becoming available.
This new research revealed countless things that wound up in the book, but the biggest was that there’d been a pattern of suicides on Clara’s side of the family….As I [looked] into the deaths of not just Clara, but her son and a granddaughter, I realized their suicides followed not only revelations pertaining to Fritz’s poison gas work but the loss of a loved one. By then I’d realized that my interest in the facts of Fritz and Clara’s lives…had waned, and what I really wanted to look at were questions [of] how we cope with the burdens of history, family, shame, guilt, heartbreak, violence, disease, and all the other losses that life piles on our shoulders. I decided to write about not only Fritz and Clara’s generation but those that followed, and I did this by inventing a fourth generation, three sisters who would serve as my narrators.
What are you working on now?
At this moment I think I’m writing a novel that will take place in America, will span the post–World War II 1940s to the early 1970s of Vietnam and the women’s liberation movement and will fictionalize a series of real murders that I find fascinating from a number of perspectives, both political and personal. But I’m only beginning, so don’t hold me to it.