Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Adam Haslett: Union Atlantic

Tonight I'm very excited to welcome Adam Hayes let's Harvard bookstore to read from his novel Union Atlantic. Mr. Hazleton first book The short story collection you are not a stranger here was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Mr. Hazlewood is the winner of a Winship pen New England award and a pen Malamud award and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker Esquire the Atlantic and Best American Short Stories among other places. Union Atlantic has been heralded as a book of our times the first great post-crash novel. But while the novel has much to say about the questionable practices of high risk finance it has more to say about the wants and needs that motivate its characters including a hotshot young banker an old Yankee woman haunted by a lost love in the sins of American history. A high school student mourning the death of his father and grappling with his sexuality and the presidents of the New York Federal Reserve trying to maintain order in an increasingly chaotic economic times. Ron Charles wrote in The Washington Post has let may be our Fitzgerald. An author capable of memorializing our crash in all its personal cost and lurid beauty and

Esquire called the Union Atlantic the first great novel of the new century. It's big and ambitious like novels used to be. It's about us now all of us. So we're excited to have Mr. Hazel here with us tonight. Thank you all for coming. It's it's great to be here and thank you for the book store for having me and to have so many friends and family and supporters here it's it's great. So the introduction told you a lot about the book so I won't go into too many further descriptions of it but it does center on a conflict between this young banker who's built this rather large house next to a retired school teacher history teacher and the third one of the third main character is Nate Fuller who's a young man who comes to be tutored by Charlotte. So I'm going to read to you actually from. Sure

Nates first encounter with Charlotte when he first comes to be tutored by her and so this is about a quarter of the way into the book and then I'm going to flip forward a little bit and read another section with the funniest stuff I will be reading so much about banking. You might be able to leave this reading without knowing that there was anything to do with banking at all of this book but. There is there is baking here somewhere and I'm happy to talk about it. So this is neat. Coming to Charlotte's house in mass which is my fictional Massachusetts town west of Boston it has a never never more fictional than in this room. For this I'm. Standing in front of the House now it looked as if it were sinking slowly into the earth hydrangeas had grown up to the lower panes of the downstairs windows and the peeling gutters

overflowed with leaves. It went in the drain pipe had broken off and leaned now against the side of the house up on the roof. The faded aluminum rods of an old television antenna had come loose from the chimney and tilted precariously toward the street. There were many places like this left and ever since Neda been a kid they've been building new houses everywhere they could dividing up lots turning fields and woods into new developments. The traffic worse every year. He wondered of Miss Cartwright his teacher had given him the wrong address if perhaps this place was uninhabited. In fact he hoped that it would be. But as soon as he tapped on the back door he heard barking in the scuffle of paws a linoleum from somewhere in the house. A voice called out words he couldn't discern. And then he heard footsteps approaching a harsh whisper followed. Don't be silly the voice said. Since when does the devil mock. Then more loudly. Who is it. It's Nate Fuller. Are you Charlotte graves. The door came open just a crack and the snouts of two dogs pressed into the gap followed a

moment later by the deeply lined face of a gray haired woman. Of course I am she said. Who else would I be. Are you some sort of Mormon they usually come in too. No he said raising his voice to be heard over the barking. I'm here for the tutoring. I called last week. We spoke on the phone did we. She considered him for a moment and then reluctantly pushed the dogs heads back into the house. Yes I suppose we did she said. I guess you'll have to come in. She pulled the door open and stood aside. As soon as Nate entered the doberman leaped up planting his front paws on its chest and pinning him to the wall. He bared his teeth and began barking. A big slobbering mastiff stood behind him graveling stopping so paranoid Willkie the woman yelled He's got nothing to do with Alija Muhammad now just come away. She scolded swatting the dog's head with a dish towel. Her dogs began to speak to her. The attacker pressed against Nate for a moment longer. The whites of his eyes bright in the dark pointed ahead reluctantly. He stepped off. Joining the other one. The two of them standing either side of their own are

like henchmen guarding passage the rest of the house. The kitchen looked like a set from The Grapes of Wrath. The wooden counter tops warped and stained the sink streaked with rust. The claw footed stove losing its white enamel. The refrigerator appeared to be the only modern appliance and even that was a pretty busted piece of merchandise. Yet this wasn't poverty that didn't describe it. It was something else something neat couldn't place. Is this a bad time he asked. Hopefully I could come back another day. No she said it's as good a time as any. I remember your call now. You're the one trying to make up for lost time. Yeah AP history. Something seemed to catch her on the red and white speckle of the milling floor. Her hands came to rest in the stretched pockets of her cardigan. For a moment there was complete silence. I don't do this much anymore she said in a reflective tone as if the commotion with the dogs had never happened and she were alone in the room making an observation aloud to herself. Tutoring I mean they didn't know what to

say. It seemed a private moment already despite his surliness. He feared she'd be disappointed if you left. Miss Cartwright she mentioned used to teach at the high school. The woman nodded emerging from her in would turn as he picked up his backpack and moved toward the center of the room the doberman began growling again. Would you like some water she asked. Or perhaps an hour in Jena. Water's fine. She moved to the sink filled a pewter tankard and handed it to him. It looked like something a night might drink from. Well she said I suppose we ought to get started. He imagined a few preliminary questions about what they had covered in class and what he had missed. But there was none of that. She had been reading about the law of property recently. She said and this letter to the subject to taxation perched on the edge of the couch she folded her hands on her lap and stared fixedly into the ashes of the fireplace. After a moment of silence she coughed slightly and said. It's customary for students to take notes right he said reaching into his bag for pen and paper Sure. The Sixteenth

Amendment is generally neglected she began but not in this household. With this she commenced an uninterrupted half hour on the adoption the federal income tax and the long road to the passage of this general levy on corporations and the wealthy an idea championed by the populists and the socialists and the Democrats under Brian shot down by the Supreme Court agitated for and one campaign after the next until finally the Republican progressives took it up as the answer to deficits in the tariff mess. Taft a president who failed to even register on a syllabus was savaged by MS. Graves is generally ponderous and ineffectual. But it should not be forgot she said that it was he who in 1909 stood before Congress and proposed an amendment to the constitution allowing the government to collect the money from an ancient wingback chair losing feathers to the frayed fabric of its cushion. Nate took in the remarkable state of the room. Every surface from the side tables to the mantel piece and a good portion of the floor was covered in paper journals newspapers magazines manila folders overflowing with yellow

documents the piles adorned with everything from coffee mugs to use plates to stray articles of clothing red wool gloves a knitted scarf and everywhere we looked books hardbacks paperbacks reference volumes ancient leather band spines with peeling gold lettering atlases books of art and photography biographies novels histories some splayed open others shot over smaller volumes the overstuffed bookcases themselves standing against the walls like sagging monuments to some bygone age of order entirely insufficient now to contain the sea of printed matter. An excise tax on the privilege of doing business is an artificial entity. That's what Taft called the corporation tax. She quoted from a term open on the coffee table in front of her. It took another four years before enough states ratified the measure and a bill from Congress could be sent to Wilson. But there it was the principle established for the privilege of earning money in this the people system you the wealthy will pay. Now she said warming

to her point move forward half a century. It's nine hundred sixty four. The Republicans are in disarray. A party in the wilderness without the White House Congress or the court. The Civil Rights Act has just been passed and along comes a man named Barry Goldwater and he's got an idea. Make government the enemy. Almost as remarkable as the sheer quantity of stuff with how completely oblivious to it Mr. Graves appeared to be. She made no comment about the condition of the place as she led Nate in letting him clear his own place to sit. It seems that as far as she was concerned nothing was amiss. And yet for all the mess she lived in and all her rambling she didn't strike him as incoherent in fact unaided never heard anyone speak with such conviction except perhaps his father. Certainly none of his teachers this was history after all. And yet she spoke as if she were waging a rhetorical insurgency against the enemies of civilization. And look at us now she continued. Look at how ingeniously they have coded our politics using the same line of attack on our own sovereign authority to suit all their other ends. Of course over

time one begins to imagine connections between the darker forces. But then you said yourself no Charlotte. You're dramatize ing. You're giving in to conspiracy. You're satisfying some desire to moralize because let's be honest you're nothing but a stack of Eastern prejudices. But then you pick up this. She scanned the books at her feet. Spot of the one she wanted and open to an earmarks page. And you think well maybe so but just listen to how they put it. Here's Lee Atwater you probably never heard of him explaining how it worked. You start out he says in 1954 by saying nigger nigger nigger by 1968 you can't say nigger that hurts you. Backfires So you say stuff like forced busing states rights and all that stuff. You getting so abstract now that you're talking about cutting taxes and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is that blacks get hurt worse than whites. That's what he says. She insisted clapping the book shut. And so then you think I'm not mad. Not at all. Taxes are about race like everything else. As if

sometime in the sixties the public square in our mind changed colors from imaginary white to imaginary black. And we've been running from it ever since. Is it anything you couldn't fence in or nail your house with the equivalent of the public pool menaced by the dark and the poor. But the public pools not in your backyard you say. It's nowhere close. True but it's in my country and I'm not allowed a patriotism of ideals. Is that what we've come to. She paused to breathe. You see then what I mean. She asked. I guess so. Not that you would agree with any of this would you she said leaning down to address the Mastiff. He's become such a reactionary lately. Haven't you save all your religious blather. Do you have dogs. No we used to have a rabbit. Don't be ridiculous. Sorry I know I wasn't talking to you. Same here is just a bigot who thinks you're Catholic. Rabbits you say. My grandfather was fond of shooting them. They pop up in the yard and he rest his gun on the

sill right there an open fire. Drove my grandmother to distraction. You'd think they'd come back in strength by now but I never see them. He of course was a monk wall. If you covered the 80s Republican of the old stripe bolted the party in 84. Small town lawyer added the Findon guys that didn't like machine politics laissez faire of course but it was another time you railed against the trust as much as the city bosses. And there he was prescient. If you look at the World Trade Organization today it's very familiar the way those conglomerates are making up the rules so they can run roughshod over the locals. Nothing the railroads didn't do with state legislatures. She concluded examining a patch of the master's back for ticks or lice. I'm afraid these bullies here need their walking she said. I'm sorry if I've run on a bit but there's a lot to cover. She looked up at him then meeting his eyes directly for the first time. You will come back want you next week. These last many months. The intuition of other's needs had become neat second nature as if his father's going had

cut him a pair of new lidless eyes that couldn't help but see into a person such as this. The room inspector driven What choice did he have. That is Charlotte and neat and I'm not going to jump forward. To Snape subsequently meets Doug the banker who works at you know planting. And he's just had his first encounter with Doug before and then he is coming over to meet his friends who we haven't really met yet in the book so you're not you haven't missed much by not having heard of him before the three friends are Jason Howe and Emily. And he is about to encounter them is coming over their house. Nate jogged the half mile to Jason's house and arrived in a sweat. Where

the hell have you been Emily shouted over the sound of the voice booming from the stereo in Jason's room. She lay on the unmade bed leafing through a copy of Harper's. Sorry I got held up he said. The evening here was still getting under way. Jason sat at his desk parceling out whitish Brown stalks and heads into small glass bowls in the corner how who'd apparently taken the liberty of showering sat lounging in Jason's blue terrycloth bathrobe an unlit cigarette in one hand an empty pack of matches in the other. You know how said I was thinking. Jason says that it's almost over. Obediently they all listen to the voice on the speakers as it swerved back and forth between reasoned calm and a kind of prophetic verve. Professor It sounded like some kind of researcher on a very extended leave. So you see the voice continued the entirety of human history has been acted out in the light of the traumatic severing of our connection into the Mother Goddess the planetary matrix

of organic wholeness. That was the centerpiece of the psychedelic experience back in the high Paleolithic. In other words the world of elucidation Invision that sill aside and carries you into is not your private unconscious or the architecture of your neural programming but it is in fact a kind of into Leckie a kind of being a kind of Gaian mind. Once you sever from this matrix of meaning what James Joyce called the moment matrix most mysterious once you sever yourself from this all you have is rationalism ego male dominance to guide you. And that's what's led us into the nightmarish labyrinth of technical civilisation all the ills of modernity. We must import into straight society almost as a Trojan horse the idea that these psychedelic compounds and plants are not operational they're not pathological they are not some minor subset of the human possibility that only freaks and weirdos get involved with but rather the catalyst that called forth humanness from animal nature. That's the call I'm making.

The audience applauded as the volume of the recording faded out. WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU GET THIS STUFF Emily asked. Interesting how loud if nothing else it's a good highbrow excuse to get wasted. That's not the point. We're not getting wasted. That is it isn't a party. Sure Hal said we're widening the lands. Exactly. Jason said rising from the desk to pass each of them their dish. We're taking what he calls the heroic dose the dose where you can't be scared anymore because there's no ego left to be frightened. The Shrooms had a stringy dirt like texture that made me gag. The Brit was passed around and took the glass of water each swallow down the bitter mush. Ingestion complete. Jason slipped on some panic retarding French pop all mild falsetto in a serial synth. Tonight's opening gesture made they recommit They're lounging. Half an hour or so past as the disco scrim left in the air about them. One day Howell said I deleted Jason I think you'll run a cult. Not

a bad way at least not at first. We'll read about you want an island with lots of women and children all of you awaiting some astral bus. My career will be over by then at twenty eight or nine and I'll wonder if I should join you. Listen Jason said. Here's a public service announcement OK. The free association thing. It can be a problem. I mean astral bus. That's the kind of thing someone could just catch on. And before you know it we're lost. Think of it like meditation. The thought comes and the thought goes you are not the thought. I'm just saying I think you'll run a cult. OK Jason replied Okay. Heavy liquid begin to pool at the back of the skull. He lay down beside Emily and closed his eyes. The after image of the ceiling lamp burning like an eclipse on the backs of his lids. Shit Emily said no one in particular. The music came in waves now cresting in the middle of the room sloshing against the walls and

dripping on the floor before rising once more above their heads. Dinner's almost ready guys. Seeing Mrs. Holland standing in the doorway. The four of them came to Shocked attention. What do you clean this place up Jason your friends don't have to put up with your laundry do they. She wore a white Raylan dress belted with snake skin and sipped a clear liquid from a tumbler held firmly in both hands from across the room her son glared at her smiling vaguely at the other three she laughed as if to say Isn't he a card. And then turned away leaving the door open behind her. Now that Hal said is the mama matrix most mysterious. Save it Jason snapped rising to close the door with his back to it. He made as if to address them. There was the part his lips to speak. Something on the carpet. Hold his attention off it like a general trying to evidence not to evidence distress before his troops. He had to master himself and knew before speaking. We've got a situation announced there's less time than I thought. We need to get

down there and we need to consume some of that food in an orderly fashion. You understand it's early going we can handle it. We just need to act quickly. How stood tighten the belt of his bathrobe and shouted I'm ready. This is a very bad idea. Emily said but Jason was already out the door and they were following him down the curving staircase. The Hollands kitchen appeared roughly the size of a tennis court seeking a base of operations a miss this vastness they made for a distressed farmhouse table in the far side of the room. When they got high in the car Nate could let sensations spill over with no interference from the world. Not so now. Circumstance had forced him to his own personal battle stations where he waged a desperate campaign against the inner flood. I'm on this wacky list serv Mrs. Holland called out from the range of these old friends of mine and who knows who else for that matter anyone I suppose everyone the terrorists she tackled anyway. Someone sent out this crazy thing professing to be a Sue Marion cookbook. Can

you imagine Julia Child running around Mesopotamia 4000 years ago lunatic really. But I thought I'd give one of these cold dishes a try. Lucky for you Whole Foods didn't have a yak. I used venison with River grass they're all enthuse about. None of you want a silly diet thing. Emily you're not doing one of those are you. No Emily said her hands clutching the edge of the table. I'm on a regular food diet. Well consider it part of your multicultural education Mrs. Holland said pouring yourself another drink. You know Jason's father is all in favor of that sort of thing. Such a progressive man. She's headed for a meltdown. Emily whispered to Nate. I've seen it happen. Mate glanced at the other two trying to gauge their coordination affectation overall cogency. He watched stunned as Jason eyeing a fly that had settled on Hal's face said hold on and then took a walnut from the bowl on the table and whipped it house for head missing

the insect by three or four inches. A fuck hell said in response that the not but smiling broadly now we're out of time. Slowly Jason's eyes fluttered shut. Their boats only rudder was coming loose. Suddenly Mrs. Holland placed a bowl of some dark vaguely living substance on the table in front of Nate. He stared up into her blazing eyes and heard her say. You guys look like you just ran a marathon. Should I turn up the air conditioning. Atop the mush in his bowl mates saw a mucous beginning to form suggesting the larval stage of some dreaded prehistoric creature. What rough beast he wondered had come round at last. Unborn since these ingredients had last mingled in some glade of the ancient world. Keep it together over there Jason whispered harshly bringing Naden to sudden awareness that only an inch separated his face from the gestation unfolding before him. He sat quickly upright trying not to cry

with fear. You all go ahead and start Mazola NSAID miles away again. I have to get this grain paste sorted out. Emily's neck stiffened something she said something has to be done. Nodding vigorously how reached into his robe into his trouser pocket and somehow managed to make his cell phone ring. A call that he promptly answered. Oh my God he said aloud out of all proportion. You're kidding. Our family kitten out there on the highway right now. Oh mom what can I do. You want me to come right now. He glanced at Jason who turned quickly to his approaching mother and looking somewhere over her shoulder said gee I guess well so how it looks like he's got this situation. I mean this pet this family pet cat. It looks as if it needs help forgetting the premise of the ruse how placed his phone down on the table for a moment the only sound was the crackle of insects being burned to death by the

caged blue light on the porch. And what about your dinner Mr Mrs Holland said. At that moment Nate realize that he had been drafted into a kind of psychic air traffic control minus training or any chance of success. Mrs. Holland's final bitter bitter word had dropped from beneath the clouds like an undetected passenger jet sailing straight for the terminal. Come on Mom. The stuff looks like shit. Her groggy eyes narrowed. Is that so. I'm so glad you learned to be so honest Jason. It's such a great quality in a man. I suppose you've told your friends that you failed too many classes to graduate. Have you told them that fuck you. He said rising from the table. Come on guys we're leaving. He crossed the room and walked out the back door the screen slapping behind him sheepishly. Emily followed. You know Mrs. Holland hell began spotting a box of matches by the salt and pepper and finally lighting the cigarette he'd been holding between his

fingers all evening. I appreciated the Samarian angle. It's always interesting to consider the origin of things particularly in these times. That sounds like a really interesting listserv you have there. He inhaled blew the smoke up toward the ceiling and then pushing his chair back exited in the opposite direction from the others back in the front hall. Alone with her now Nate watched as the viscosity in the air which he had prayed was just a passing warp of his eye began to leak openly in the world. The ceiling above Mrs. Holland becoming a slick throbbing who's the lights in the room starting to pulse bleeding along the edges of her rigid mother body and then within her as well her whole form glowing a dim orangey red. The ember of some slowly dying need. I'm sorry he said standing up from the table. I'm really sorry. It's really started with the characters. I always begin with

people sort of on their own more or less and the writing the book is trying to get them to all come into the same world. So there's a lot of material for each of these characters that didn't wind up in the book. So by getting to discovering more things and investigating them in a sense you figure out what's the most salient and then that's what winds up between the covers. I mean that with the short stories and in many ways begin the same way that I began with the characters here which is that what I'm trying to discover is or invent is a rhythm to the sentences so that when you're reading about a certain character it's not just the positive content of the words that the reader is getting but it's a music in a rhythm beneath the content that reinforces it in a way. Gives you access to a texture of their interior life.

So each of the characters in this book I didn't read any of Doug but he's the banker character in this book and he senses that I'm describing him or from more clipped and clear clean in Charlotte's thoughts are far more loopy in the you've just seen a bit of Nate's. So in a short story The same thing is true I'm just trying to make sure that the next sentence is written in a rhythm that makes sense with the previous sentence of if that makes any sense. So it's it is there is a lot of hearing that is the logic that I'm working with. I don't think there wasn't a particular book but I know I do like the narrative structure of meeting. I mean it's not you know fairly routine but meeting lots of people at the beginning and not knowing how eventually they're going to wind up with one another. But I'd say overall the ambition. Here was because it was my first novel I will

I did want it to be something other than a short story that had a lot of pages and so I wanted to have some of that had a certain amount of social scope in the first thing that interested me was the guy at the Fed and that's the character that I wrote of the first scene of 10 years ago and that implied a certain arc or with the painting material and then but I wanted to do that without sacrificing the the intensity of the interior life of the people that it's been. You know the time working on stories so that it was like how do how to get the scope but still remain very much in the head of each person so the result is that it's a story told from the close third person point of view but the events there are they're more outwardly turned. The people in this novel than that it doesn't really answer your question at all but there it is. They're the. I mean I certainly have places in my own mind very much. I mean there they float

around there they change a bit now and again but I mean the houses and the overall setting so the question is just how much to give the reader both of these seams are interiors so you're just you're inside the house but so I try to give some sense of that world. But it's always I think in most writers would tell you it's the exact shape of the world even the exact look of a character's face is something that doesn't become fixed in your own mind. Convenience can play a role when you're going along depending on where a scene is going so it's I don't have a photograph that I'm reproducing a scene from I just have a landscape the general landscape of it. This book I was working on for five years the most often intense frustration severe doubt radical doubt that it's going to all fall together

and that I'm going to be able to do it that it's worthwhile. And if there was one thing that I think that I learned from this more than nothing else is that if you're going to complete a book you have to be able to survive long periods of radical doubt. But what you're up to if you don't you won't finish it and if you I mean the mantra I came up with is just because I've had a bad day doesn't mean my book has had a bad day. So you try to separate yourself out from the insane level of identification with the thing you're working on. So yeah and then at the end it was it was very pleasurable at the end once the thing had quickened and I was writing the last third of the book. I was able to see I would experience the pleasure of the privilege of be able to yeah you know towards the end I mean it's towards the end my she my editors been editing books for a long time probably for 40 years or

something. And so she is she's also married to a writer so she has a very. A very subtle but sophisticated sense of how to push not push but sort of gently shuffle you in a certain direction. So for instance when she's reading a page we sat down after the manuscript finished we're going over things and after I had handed her a draft and she would say well I wasn't you know I I'm sure it's me. I'm sure I just don't follow these things but I just didn't get this passage here in it. It reminds me of when I first edited Robert Penn Warren. And you're like OK yeah I guess I'll take that piece of advice. So yeah she just said it was actually just an event at her house last night and so she is very good and yet at the end if you say no it has to stay that way. There's no more conversation it stays that way. So I'm very much benefited from a sort of old school

respect for the for the writer and and then just in the middle of the process that's toward the end during the middle. Basically all she says is keep going. This is good keep going because she just knows that that's what you need. You know I mean it I mean unless it's really gone off the rails. You just need to know yes you should keep going. So I appreciate her light touch. No I mean I realize I've just done a terrible job of not repeating the questions for the camera. I was told to do that I'm sorry. Does the town that I grew up in or does the town of the book represent the town I grew up in. It's an it's an amalgam of of I grew up in a couple of different towns in Massachusetts and then also just other ideas about what's going on so it's I sort of scrunch things together and borrowed from various places. For sure the question is why did I open with the episode at the Persian Gulf the book begins. Despite what you just heard in the Persian Gulf the U.S. has been saying this is where

a U.S. ship was just in the process of shooting down an Iranian passenger jet. Doug fanning the lead characters on that ship as a radar man. Like a lot of different sections of the book I actually wrote it out of sequence. So it was not the first thing I wrote by any means. I just became instantly interested in that event. I read a lot about it as a lot of what's been written about it. It's I was writing this book in the time that we were the Iraq war already started and it was a moment of Samy forgotten history of us in the Gulf when we were supporting Iraq we were supporting Saddam. And where I sort of imagine myself what would it be like if the Chinese navy patrolled 100 miles off the coast of the Atlantic every day of our lives. Like what. You know that sort of the psychological import of having a foreign navy in your waters and and there are larger themes in the book about the intrusion of American

power and finance and militarism that are sort of run through the book. So a lot of that I can say now that I wrote it at the time. I love the sound of the word Vincenzo. I love the sound of the word her moves the Strait of Hormuz. So I read a lot about it and then it turned out that the lead character was the guy I was writing about. You know it's curious I mean I I and most of the questions about mental illness. Why do I write about it so much. I mean in this book there are less people going to the psychiatrists than in the last book. But I try to. I get let me let me answer this way. It seems to me that mental illness is like a conceptual suitcase that people can just pick the suitcase up and not have to open the suitcase to see all the mess that's inside it. And so when I'm writing about characters I try not to actually use those

preconceptions in advance of just entering someone's life. So I think you learn a lot about people when they're in states of extremis that's where people are most interesting to encounter. And so I mean certainly there's you know family and friends there's some experience of it but it's more answering the question for myself of how do we perceive the world and what happens when those perceptions don't meet everybody else's expectations of the woman in this book who I have no diagnosis for it's probably not mental or his abilities unlike senility I don't know what it is but. She's just someone who's being driven a little mad by her own historical tradition and that's what interests me more than a medical attack I guess. No I didn't the book though it does deal with the Fed in a troubled bank it was.

I did finish it the week that Lehman Brothers collapsed. It's true story. Yeah it was strange it was an uncanny experience because I started reading The New York Times that week and I said oh I wrote that scene last year you know where the bankers go down to the New York Fed and all this stuff happened so I think the book is not about an actual full meltdown or you know nearly full meltdown like we experienced It's about the things that led up to that and bank on the verge. So. I was going to rewrite the book at that point. And so I just had to make a decision whether I was going to tinker with things or just let it be. And I decided the latter just because things were happening so quickly and it was of such a huge scale that I just thought this will stand for what happened before. Yeah I mean I don't know I mean in a sense I can see what they're talking about as much as I mean the aim isn't to write people that

are sort of happy go. Nice folks I mean but I think I mean I couldn't write about someone for a length of time if I didn't have some deep seated sympathy for them. Even for Doug who I think of as lost in a kind of anger and kind of mailing or so wholly likable I guess that's not an ambition in a sense. And I mainly just want to you know is non-judgmental a fashion as I can put the reader in someone's mind and ask them to dwell there for a while you know. So thank you all for coming.