Chaucer Playing Tetris: Archival Interview with Lev Grossman

BLOGGER’S NOTE: Lev Grossman has a new novel coming out (it’s called The Magicians, and it’s wonderful), and I have decided to mark the occasion by dusting off this conversation we had when Codex was first released. Among the many, many author interviews I have conducted, this one stands out as a favorite. I love Codex, Grossman was a lot of fun to talk to, and—if I do say so myself—this is a fine example of literary interrogation: It enriches the reader’s experience of the book, and both interviewer and interviewer come off as pretty smart.

I did this interview while I was working for Borders, so there’s one thing I couldn’t say then—back when Dan Brown was basically signing my paychecks—that I’d like to add now: Every positive comment you’ve ever heard or read about The Da Vinci Code—e.g., favorable comparisons to The Name of the Rose—that are patently untrue of that work are probably true of Codex.

Interview conducted in 2004

Investment banker Edward Wozny is on vacation when his firm assigns him the task of helping a powerful, enigmatic client organize a personal library. This mildly irritating and seemingly innocuous job lures Edward out of his mundane existence and into a strange universe of rare books, medieval mysticism, and aristocratic intrigue. 

Codex is Edward’s story. It’s also the story of a missing manuscript—a strange and beguiling text that may or may not have been written by a 14th-century historian—and of a particularly hypnotic computer game. Lev Grossman weaves these imaginative artifacts into an utterly absorbing mystery.

What part of this novel came to you first—the manuscript, the game, or the main character?

Lev Grossman: Oddly enough, the title came to me first. I can vividly remember walking down a hill near where I was living at the time—in some crappy grad-student apartment—and thinking, “Codex: That’s a snappy title. I think I’ll write a book about it.” But the book really came out of the summer of ’95… You know, I’ve spent a really long time writing this book. Anyway, that summer I was working in the rare books library at Yale—it’s called the Beinecke. I was immersed in an incredibly weird and seductive world of extremely rare and valuable of books. It’s a real Willy Wonka moment, when you get to go behind the circulation desk, where they keep all the <i>really</i> good stuff that nobody else gets to see. Suddenly you’re fondling letters written by Joyce and Tennyson. I felt like this was something I had to know more about, and something I wanted to write about.

I’m guessing from your use of the word "fondling" that you had an affection for books before you worked in the rare-books library?

LG: I was already a book lover, definitely. But I don’t think I lapsed into full-on bibliophilia until I worked at the Beinecke. I don’t know that I’ve ever been in contact with something that felt so much like a sacred object as some of the texts I encountered at that library. My first day, when I was going through these letters written by William Beckford—who I happened to be reading for a course at the time—and my tiny mind was just simply blown by it.

There are other novels about the search for a text—The Name of the Rose and Possession come to mind immediately. In both those stories the protagonists are obsessed with books from the start. The labyrinthine, sometimes dangerous, situations in which they find themselves are the result of a pre-existing condition. But your hero, Edward, isn’t particularly interested in books before he embarks on his adventure. His experiences in bibliomania are a weird, secret, otherworldly interlude in an otherwise very normal life.

LG: I wanted Edward to begin the book as a philistine, but also a sort of latent bibliophile. He’s a very crass, not unintelligent, but very ordinary bloke. I wanted him to feel the dreamlike rush of being plunged into a strange new world, and to discover in himself these desires and obsessions that he had never known before. I didn’t want him to be an insufferable pedant—because I’m an insufferable pedant and I know how unpleasant that is. I wanted to see him go all the way from being an ordinary fellow to being something that he’d never thought he would become.

Your book is, in an oblique way, a parable about the dangers of reading.

LG: I’d never known about the concept of dangerous reading until I took a course on Chaucer, which I was forced to take. I was a modernist. I was interested in Joyce and Hemingway, and I hadn’t read the fine print on my acceptance letter to grad school, which said I had to take two courses on literature written before the year 1600. So, I just took the first one that came along, which happened to be Chaucer. We read everything but The Canterbury Tales.

The first thing we read was a poem that almost nobody reads called “The Book of the Duchess.” It opens with this scene—and I’ll just tell you about it because nobody ever reads “The Book of the Duchess”—in which this guy is sitting in bed and he’s got all these books around him and he’s thinking, “I’m really depressed, so I’m going to take down a book and read.” The professor pointed out that this was very odd. Nothing could seem more normal to us, but for somebody to sit down by himself and read a secular tale for his own amusement was considered very eccentric at that time. It was sort of frowned upon. It’s kind of wonderful to think of reading as taboo, as forbidden. We’ve forgotten the risks and dangers of that kind of reading.

It wasn’t even until, like, the 10th or 11th century that people realized that you could read, silently, to yourself. Before that, they would pick up a book and automatically start reading words aloud, because reading was a public event.

The manuscript you created in your novel is an amazing creation, really compelling and really disturbing. I wish it actually existed so that I could read it.

LG: It was the funnest part of the book to write—no question about that. If you’ve ever read Thomas Malory, or some of the Chaucer’s minor works, or any of the romances of the 14th and 15th centuries… They’re very weird, all these myths about people getting various parts of them cut off and having mystical adventures and being subjected to the whims of an angry, inscrutable God—lots of strange things going on in there. Those stories are truly weird and chilling. You know, reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as an undergraduate was probably the first time I felt like my mind was really making contact with somebody else’s mind, the mind of a totally different time. That book is just so screwed up.

The manuscript is one half of Edward’s adventure. The other is the computer game. Where did that come from?

LG: Well, I got into that through my twin brother, who, for much of his life, has been a professional designer of video games. I’ve become kind of interested in them myself… There’s something repellent about them, but at the same, something kind of fascinating. It’s not every day that you can sit around and watch the birth of an entirely new medium, and that’s what’s happening right now. People made up video games in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s, and they’ve already grown into an industry that’s larger than the movie industry. I think it’s really fascinating to watch and explore.

There’s a great passage in “The House of Fame”—another of those minor Chaucer works I was forced to read—where Chaucer’s making fun of himself for reading. Everybody thought it was so weird: He’s just sitting there with his book, completely spaced out. He’s silent and he’s staring at this thing and his mouth is open and his eyes are glazed. It sounds just like a person playing a video game. And you suddenly realize, the way we look at people who play games now must have been something like the way they looked at people reading novels back then.

Chaucer was totally playing Tetris on his Game Boy.

LG: [Laugh.] He totally was. It took a long time for literature to become an interesting, complicated means of expressing important ideas. And it will be kind of interesting to see whether games go that same route.

Recent Acquisitions

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren

Ladies of Fantasy: Two Centuries of Sinister Stories by the Gentle Sex, selected by Seon Manley and Gogo Lewis

Pendragon: Arthur and His Britain by Joseph P. Clancy

The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World, edited by Albert B. Friedman

Interview with Virginia Kantra

If she didn't have sex with something soon, she would burst out of her skin.

So begins Sea Witch, the first novel in Virginia Kantra’s Children of the Sea trilogy. While most paranormal romance authors deploy incredibly complicated plot devices to make it acceptable for their heroines to go all the way with sultry strangers within the first thirty pages or so, Kantra refuses to offer any sort of narrative apologia. Instead, she presents readers with a protagonist who is driven purely by her own physical need. Of course, it makes a difference that Kantra’s heroine is a selkie—a seal who assumes a woman’s shape on land.

The authors of paranormal romance regularly borrow from folklore in their search for resonant tropes and characters, but Kantra makes particularly deft use of her source material. In Sea Witch, for example, she exploits her heroine’s non-human status to teasingly challenge readers’ expectations.  She is working within the genre while pushing against its boundaries. Her subtlety is exceptional. One of the big surprises in the interview below is the revelation that Sea Witch was, in part, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Mermaid.” Magred’s slow transformation from selkie to human shows no traces of Andersen’s heavy-handed moralizing. Kantra is able to give her heroine a soul while preserving the ambiguity and ambivalence of the folkloric selkie.

On your Website, you say that you’ve always enjoyed fairy tales. Have you had a lifelong interest in folklore, as well, or is that something that you’ve only recently begun to study? What folklore are you interested in at the moment?

Virginia Kantra: As soon as I had a library card, I read my way through Andrew Lang's collections of fairy tales—all twelve volumes!—which were originally published around the turn of the century.  A lot of those are based on folk tales from all over the world.

Growing up, I didn't make a distinction between fairy tales and folklore.  My father was an English professor.  The bookshelves in our living room were jammed with Aristophanes, Ovid, Pope, and Milton on one side of the fireplace and Chesterton, Belloc, and Frazer’s The Golden Bough on the other.  I categorized everything as either "stuff I could read" or "boring stuff."

I'm developing more Children of the Sea stories, which as you know use the legend of the selkie, but I'm expanding the role of the finfolk, based on another bit of Orkney folklore.  I'm also intrigued by the legend of the njugl, the Shetland water horse, and trying to think how to fit that in with my current project. 

The Children of the Sea novels are not, of course, your first works. What inspired you to embark on this series?

VK: At the same time I was writing my first two romantic suspense novels for Berkley, I also did a couple of novellas based on legends about the fair folk.  I had what I thought was the idea for another contemporary romantic suspense: police chief on a remote island in Maine finds a naked woman who’s been attacked on the beach.  

And then I thought . . . What if she wasn’t human?

The “naked” bit set me off, I think.  There are folk tales up and down the British coast about the selkie, shape-shifters who take the form of seals in the ocean and cast off their pelts—get naked—to come ashore as beautiful men and women who have sex with humans.  Which is a fabulous fantasy if you are a lonely sailor and a pretty unarguable explanation if you are an unmarried village maiden who can’t possibly name, say, the married butcher as the father of your baby. 

It was that juxtaposition, that tension between land and sea, between the contemporary, pragmatic, police procedural world of my hero and the timeless, sensual, magical world of my heroine, that totally hooked me into the first story and into the series.

One of the things that I found most striking when I read Sea Witch was the beginning: Magred is a female character looking for sex—not love—when she goes ashore. It struck me that an author can do things with a non-human character that might be difficult to do with a human character; that is, behavior that's acceptable for a selkie might not be acceptable in a human. Do you find it liberating to work with supernatural beings?

VK: I did reverse gender expectations a little there, didn't I?  Genre expectations, too, perhaps.  At least one reviewer criticized Margred for not falling in love sooner, for not being "human enough." 

For me, non-human characters are a way to explore what makes us truly human: the capacity to choose, to love, to commit.  I wanted to take Margred's "otherness" seriously, both as a non-human character with a unique point of view and as a way of exploring human relationships.   I had to consider how Margred’s experience and emotions within her element—her environment, the sea—would affect her thoughts and decisions on land.  There’s a recurring line in the books that I use to capture the children of the sea:  “We flow as the sea flows.”  I adored writing Margred because she’s so amazingly sensual and sexually confident, but has so much to learn about faith, love, and tenderness.   

Romance novels are often compared to fairy tales, and they do share many structural similarities. And paranormal romance novels, in particular, borrow from folklore. But paranormal romances also tend to have a sense of cosmic danger—the heroine is often caught up in a battle between vast forces, a battle with far-reaching consequences—that is generally absent from folktales. How does this tension between your folkloric source materials and the demands of the genre affect your work?

VK: What you're saying is probably true about the majority of paranormal romance, but frankly, I don't think about the "demands of the genre" when I'm writing.  For me, high personal stakes trump cosmic consequences every time. 

But even in fairy tales, you'll notice, the characters' choices often have implications for their larger worlds.  We miss that sometimes as modern readers because we don't think of princes and princesses as part of a recognized social order.  "Cinderella," for example, hinges on dynastic realities—the prince must marry because the kingdom needs an heir.  When the Beast in "Beauty and the Beast" offends the witch, his entire kingdom suffers for his sin.  Even the superstitions surrounding the practice of the corn maiden have implications for the harvest.  So once I have the characters and their personal conflicts in place, I do look for those kinds of larger consequences as a way of upping the stakes.

Have you been inspired by any particular folktales—rather than just the idea of selkies—in shaping the plots or characters of your Children of the Sea novels or "Sea Crossing"?

VK: Absolutely. I got the idea of linking the first three books from an old shanty, "The Keeper of the Eddystone Light": "My father was the keeper of the Eddystone Light, and he married a mermaid one fine night.  Of that union, there came three..." 

Sea Witch borrows pretty freely from Hans Christian Andersen's original "The Little Mermaid," especially in terms of Margred's search for a soul:

“So I shall die,” said the little mermaid, “and as the foam of the sea I shall be driven about never again to hear the music of the waves, or to see the pretty flowers nor the red sun. Is there anything I can do to win an immortal soul?”

The whole mythology I created for the elementals and the "First Creation" is of course patterned on the Creation story in Genesis.

Sea Fever doesn't draw on any particular source, but the upcoming Sea Lord was definitely inspired by Hades' abduction of Persephone, including the rape in the garden and the setting of the story in fall and winter.  Perhaps because I was already using all that harvest imagery, I also used the tradition of the corn maiden. 

Since you can't get a look at that book before May, I'm pasting in the relevant bit below. 

    He slid his knife from the sheath at his knee.

    Corn stood around them in patches, skeletons of summer among the stakes and twine.  Conn gathered a sheaf in one arm and, bending, sliced it through in a single stroke close to the ground.  He bound the dried stalks together with twine, tying them to form a waist, a neck, legs.  The shock at the top he left loose like long, stiff hair. 

    He laid the corn maiden on the ground beside Lucy, measuring its length with his eyes.  They were almost the same size.  He dressed the sheaf in the girl's clothing, forcing the jeans over the stalks of its legs, bundling its body into the shirt.  He was sweating when he finished.  Bits of dust and broken chaff clung to his skin.

    Kneeling beside Lucy, he gathered her hair in one hand the way he'd gathered the corn, counting the strands across his palm, one, two, three...seven.  Her face was still, her skin cold and pale. 
    An unexpected twinge caught him beneath the ribs.  He used sex as a tool, a weapon.  He did not expect it to turn like a knife in his hand.  But his feelings, her feelings, could not be allowed to matter.  He did what he must do.

    Fisting his hand around the strands of her hair, he yanked them out by the roots.
    Her breath escaped her lips in a silent cry.  A drop of blood beaded at her scalp, but his magic compelled her to sleep.
    He set his teeth, touching his finger to the blood and then to the center of the bundled corn, the claidheag, where the corn maiden's heart would beat.  If such a creature had a heart.  His fingertip burned.  He felt the heat flow upward through his arm, power building and pulsing like a headache.  He tied the seven strands of hair over the twine at the top.
    "Know," he commanded.  The pressure hammered at his temples.    He blew into the featureless face.  "Breathe."
    He pressed the heel of his palm between Lucy's legs, still wet with her essence and his seed.  The magic gripped his neck like claws, sinking fangs into his skull, squeezing his brain.  He smeared his wet hand over the dry husks of the claidheag, anointing it with life.  "Be."
    He felt the surge, the shock of focused power, leap from him to the sheaf on the ground.
    Done.
    The power ebbed away, leaving him drained, his head throbbing with the aftermath of magic, and the claidheag stiff and still.
    Conn inhaled, holding his breath to fill the sudden emptiness of his chest.
    Lucy slept, unknowing.
    He lifted her body in his arms and carried her away, leaving his handiwork lying behind them in the field.

    The dried stalks rattled together.  Know.
    The wind whispered.  Breathe.
    The earth radiated warmth.  Be.
    The breeze teased the bundle on the ground.  The claidheag's hair, the pale gold of corn husks or straw, fluttered, smoothing, softening.  Beneath the swaddling clothes, its limbs swelled and grew supple, taking on substance, taking on flesh. 
    From the branches of a spruce, a crow launched, squawking in protest or warning. 
    The corn maiden opened its eyes, the green yellow of pumpkin vines.  Lucy's eyes, in Lucy's face.
    It lay in the field, watching the clouds chase across the sky, absorbing the last rays of the sun, listening to the chatter of the wind.  
    A catbird landed on a nearby stake, cocked a fierce, bright eye and flew away again.  An ant, wandering the furrows, traced a trail over the claidheag's motionless hand.  Slowly, thought formed, a pale shoot from a kernel of consciousness. 
    It did not belong here, cut down, cut off from the earth. 
    Not anymore. 
    Sighing, the claidheag raised on one elbow and then to its knees.  To its feet.  It should go...The word was buried deep, a fat, round word, moldy with disappointment.  Home.  It should go home.
    Following the tug of blood, the stir of memory, it shambled toward the road.

Archival Interview with Jessica Berger Gross, Editor of About What Was Lost

NOTE: This interview was conducted in 2007. I’m retrieving it from the archives because the book was just reviewed in USA Weekend.

Almost 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. I didn’t know this until I had a miscarriage of my own. I was surprised to learn that it’s so common, since women almost never talk about it. I wasn’t able to find anything much written on the subject, either. I can’t say that the cultural silence surrounding miscarriage made the experience worse—I don’t know if anything could have made it worse—but it certainly didn’t make it any easier. 

The anthology, About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope, is a much-needed addition to the literature of mourning. I contributed an essay, and I recently interviewed the collection’s editor, Jessica Berger Gross, for Literary Mama. We talked about loss, the publishing process, and what it’s like to edit a famous author.

Cookbooks I Am Trying to Unload on Amazon

The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook by Ina Garten

The Best Vegetarian Recipes: From Greens to Grains, from Soups to Salads: 200 Bold Flavored Recipes by Martha R. Schulman

La Comida del Barrio: Latin-American Cooking in the U.S.A. by Aaron Sanchez

Nancy Silverton’s Pastries from the La Brea Bakery

Bouchon by Thomas Keller

The French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller

A Return to Cooking by Eric Ripert and Michael Rulhman

Books I Have Purchased Recently, in Alphabetical Order by Author or Editor

Tam Lin by Pamela Dean
Dark Prince by Christine Feehan
A Kiss of Shadows by Laurell K. Hamilton
A Mermaid’s Kiss by Joey W. Hill
The Selkie by Melanie Jackson 
They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life by Oliver James
Sea Witch by Virginia Kantra
Pretend Soup and Other Real Recipes: A Cookbook for Preschoolers and Up by Mollie Katzen
Man of My Dreams by Sherrilyn Kenyon, Maggie Shayne, Suzanne Forster, and Virginia Kantra
Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art by Julia Kristeva
The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice Miller
The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi
Good Babies: A Tale of Trolls, Humans, a Witch and a Switch by Tim Myers, with illustrations by Kelly Murphy
The Portable Kristeva (2nd Edition), edited by Kelly Oliver
The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope
Awaiting the Moon by Donna Simpson
Lord of the Deep by Dawn Thompson
Tales of the Seal People: Scottish Folk Tales by Duncan Williamson
49 Sensational Skirts: Creative Embellishment Ideas for One-of-a-Kind Designs by Alison Willoughby
Irish Fairy and Folk Tales, edited by William Butler Yeats

An American Voice: Randa Jarrar on Her Debut Novel

Nidali’s father is Palestinian, which means, essentially, that he is homeless; he is the citizen of a country that doesn’t exist. Her mother is half Egyptian and half Greek. In addition to this mixed-up pedigree, Nidali has a rather peripatetic personal history, one that stretches from Kuwait to Texas. And Nidali is endowed by her creator—first-time novelist Randa Jarrar—with one of the most engaging narrative voices I’ve encountered in awhile. Singular and universal, hilarious and occasionally heartbreaking, A Map of Home is an outstanding coming-of-age story.

One of the things I admired most about your book was how—without melodrama, and without allowing your heroine excessive self-pity—you make the political personal. At 13, Nidali isn’t upset about the invasion of Kuwait because it’s an abrogation of international law; she’s upset about it because it screws up her social life. This is something that a lot of readers will, I think, understand in a way that they might not understand, say, the feeling of having bombs dropped near one’s home.

Randa Jarrar: Thank you. Well, I made a conscious choice early on in the process for Nidali to have a fresh perspective—that the things that would upset or anger her should surprise the reader. For example, a reader might expect the family to leave Kuwait because of the danger or the imminent arrival of American forces, but they leave because they run out of za’tar spice. I just think it’s funnier and more interesting that way.

There’s a moment in your novel when Nidali’s father remarks on the constantly shifting borders of Palestine and says, “There’s no telling where home starts and where it ends.” For him, this is tragic, but, for Nidali, it’s liberating. Is Nidali’s reaction an accurate reflection of your own feelings about the idea of home?

RJ: Nidali’s dad has suffered so much partly because he lost his home, and also because he’s spent so much time and energy trying to regain it, even psychologically. Nidali has a different take, a different way to adapt to displacement. She can either find it tragic, the way her baba does, or she can find or cling to a new home, or she can realize that she is a borderless person; someone who can belong anywhere. Of course, the last option is the most exciting for her. And yes, it is for me, too.

Nidali is a wonderfully expressive character. It's both heartbreaking and hilarious when she arrives in the United States and, all of the sudden, her speech assumes the stilted formality peculiar to English as a second language. Experiencing that transition in your story really made me think about how hard it must be to move not just to a new country, but also to a new language.

RJ: It’s very lonely. But you know, I think Nidali is really fortunate in that transition, because she went to English schools; she knew the language and understood it well; it was the cultural aspect that was difficult. I remember when I first moved to the US I translated everything people said into Arabic, not to understand it, but to warm up to it. And I’d sometimes be watching a Marilyn Monroe movie and fantasize about her speaking her lines in sultry Arabic. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but I was trying to bridge that distance. The language difference is huge, I think, because it removes you from the familiar, but also from the great feeling of being at one and in-sync with the people and culture around you.

Do you have a different personality in Arabic than you do in English?

RJ: Not anymore. I’ve always had a crazier, edgier English persona, but now I feel comfortable and confident enough in my own skin that I can be crazy in Arabic, too. It always takes me a couple of days when I travel back to Egypt, though; I have a hard time sassing in Arabic there at first. But after the first two days, I’m back to making blowjob jokes and shocking and entertaining my friends and family.

Is there an added responsibility—or an added burden—to being a Middle Eastern voice in American culture at this particular moment?

RJ: Hmmm, I have to say I find the question a teensy bit problematic. I consider myself an American voice.

But if I had to answer, I’d add “pleasure” to that list: a responsibility, a burden, and a pleasure.

I started this novel just before 9/11, and after 9/11 I retreated into the novel completely. My writing gave me comfort. That was the pleasure part. And the burden comes afterwards, when I feel as though I have to translate my characters and their way of life. But I think part of my responsibility is to my characters, and to be fair to them, I have to let the reader do some of the leg-work.

What are you working on now?

RJ: I’ve just finished revising a new book of fiction, a dozen stories set in New York, Iran, Texas, Zaire, the Puget Sound, Gaza, Australia, Michigan, and Egypt. I’m really excited about it. And I’m now in the research and planning stages of a new novel.

Another feminist rabbi: Danya Ruttenberg gets religion

When she was a teenager, Danya Ruttenberg was an atheist who enjoyed going to punk shows and reading existentialist philosophy. Now, she’s a rabbi who compares her relationship with God to “an intimate marriage”. Her new memoir, Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion, tells the story of this transformation. In this interview, she talks about her commitment to service and explains the difference between fundamentalism and thoughtful faith.

So, how does it feel to believe in God?

Danya Ruttenberg: How does it feel? Glorious. Safe. Not always comfortable, though. There are a lot of things that I might want, a lot of ways that I might want to take the easy route but, according to my understanding of the Divine and my relationship to God, those things might not be what I need, or what God needs of me. I’m forced to grow and push myself out of the simple answers to learn how to do better, to be better. The move from atheism to faith feels like the move from a place that was frightening and in which I was utterly alone to one in which I am interconnected and embraced on this level that’s impossible to articulate (what with the Divine being beyond words and all). Despite the horrible ways that we humans may abuse and misuse our free will, it now seems clear to me that beyond that, there’s a profound holiness (a Someone or Something—pick your metaphor) waiting patiently for us to tune in and get on the sweet, sweet channel that will help us learn how to shift from people who want to be gratified into people who want to serve.

Your undergraduate degree is in religious studies, so you actually knew a lot about religion before you began to practice a religion. Have you found your academic background to be a help or a hindrance to your faith?

DR: For me personally, I find it to be a help. Blind, uncritical adherence was never my bag of chips—and frankly, I think that’s true of quite a lot of people, many more than non-religious folks often assume. Fundamentalist thinking makes up a very, very small percentage of religious thinking; Jewish textual history is nothing if not 2000 years of critical thinking, of looking for problems and inconsistencies in our texts!

In my case, I came into Jewish practice having already heard that—for example—most contemporary scholars posit at least four distinct authors (or schools of authorship) to the Torah. That doesn’t mean that I don’t regard the Torah as a holy text, or understand God’s Revelation on Sinai (as described in Exodus 19 and 20) as true on some level. One may be describing a historical reality, and the other a deeper, metaphoric or spiritual reality. Paul Ricoeur talks about a “second naiveté”, the ability to see sacred text’s holiness shining through even after learning the historical bits. There’s historical truth, which I don’t discount at all, and there is, co-existing with it, a deeper truth about what it is to be a person and what it is to live your life in alignment with the sacred.

As a religious person, whether or not Abraham the patriarch was a historical figure is irrelevant to me—I’m more interested in what I have to learn from the stories that the Torah tells about him. And yet, finding out that, say, many Psalms borrow their structure from Canaanite poetry (and learning what that structure is and in what ways the Psalms are similar to and different from the Canaanite versions…, etc.)—well, that’s just cool, and that deepens my understanding of and appreciation them. Of course there was inter-cultural mingling, of course nothing happens in a vacuum! That doesn’t mean the result isn’t valuable.

It should be noted that in my rabbinic program—as with seminaries of Christian friends—they teach scholarly history as part of the deal. Scholarship and faith are far from mutually exclusive, and if you’re going to care about these texts and live your life by them, why wouldn’t you want to know what contemporary researchers are learning about them? Faith isn’t something so brittle that it breaks every time a new archaeological discovery is made that might challenge a religious reading of a text—if it can’t handle those small challenges, it certainly can’t stand up to the serious questions that every theology engages.

While I was reading your memoir, I found myself wanting to know more about the process of ordination. But, when I got to the end, I understood your reluctance to make that experience the climax of your narrative. In your memoir, you suggest that “going pro” isn’t the only legitimate response to a spiritual awakening. Did you feel a special responsibility to make your story accessible to people of faith who might not become clergy?

DR: Absolutely. There are plenty of wonderful spiritual memoirs out there about entering the monastery, becoming clergy, and so forth. Until I applied to rabbinical school, though, (which I did around the point that the story told in Surprised By God was ending, i.e., where the reader sees me last in the narrative) I was a lay Jew trying to figure out how to integrate religious practice into the rest of my life. This is a book about the ways that taking on a spiritual practice changes us all. My quoting of other thinkers and bringing in examples of similar issues in other faiths was my way of making it abundantly clear that this is a process with which everyone struggles, and though my time in rabbinical school was amazing—really transformative—that’s a much less universal experience, and I didn’t want readers to get off of the universal tip, to stop implicitly reading this book as about being about them as well.

The role of women in religion is a contentious issue in a number of faith traditions. I know that not all Jewish communities embrace the idea of women rabbis, but have you found that most of the people you’ve encountered have been supportive? How many women rabbis are there?

DR: I’m not sure how many women rabbis there are total in the world, but we’ve been ordained in America in a mainstream way (there have been a few incredible renegades here and there throughout history) since 1972, and since 1985 in my denomination. So there are quite a few already out there, and many more each year! Most people are totally supportive; it’s not a shocking or unusual thing in the circles in which I travel. (Actually, it’s a very mundane thing in my own circles—“oh, look, another feminist rabbi, how boring.”) There are still folks who don’t embrace the idea, but overwhelmingly, the mark has already been made on American Jewish life. We’re here, and these days there are more and more out queer rabbis, trans rabbis, rabbis of various racial and cultural backgrounds, and so forth. The stereotype of the old white guy with the long beard doesn’t really mesh with the reality today. (Of course, I know some brilliant bearded, older, male rabbis—they just don’t have the monopoly on rabbinic representation anymore!)

Has becoming a rabbi changed your life? Has it changed your faith or your practice?

DR: Yes.

Oh, you wanted a longer answer? OK: The process of becoming clergy has deepened my faith and given it a heft that I couldn’t have imagined before. It’s taught me lessons in humility and in understanding myself as an instrument of service to others. It’s altered my relationship with God, transforming it from something kind of like a passionate lovesickness and more like an intimate marriage. My practice has changed and shifted and grown as I have, sometimes causing me to be stricter than I thought I would be in my practice, sometimes more lenient than I thought I would ever be. I’ve also learned a bit about the symbolic role that the rabbi plays to so many people, and how powerful that is, and how important it is to handle that perception with care. It’s a lot, but it’s amazing. I feel humbled and grateful every day.

My Favorite Books of 2007: Then We Came to the End

NOTE: I have, recently, been blogging some of my favorite books of 2006. Inspired by the paperback release of one of my favorites of 2007, I’m going to jump ahead a bit.

I didn’t really want to like Then We Came to the End. It’s set in an office much like the one in which I worked for five years, and it seemed like it would be the kind of book that, had I applied myself—or, like, had I had the idea—I could have written. Well, I was wrong: I could not have written this book. It’s brilliant, and my own baby steps into fiction (one story [ahem.] published in a magazine for girls, a tidy little pile of rejection letters with great potential for future growth) demonstrate a puny fraction of the skill and craft on display in Joshua Ferris’s debut.

You may have heard of this book. You may know that it was a finalist for the National Book Award, but, if you know anything at all about this book, you probably know that it’s narrated, mostly, in the second-person plural.* This is a bold move, an aesthetic maneuver at which it would have been so very easy to fail. Ferris not only pulls it off, he makes it sing. His “we” captures the sort of collective consciousness that grows among corporate wage slaves, but that doesn’t mean that his narrator moves through the novel as a lumpen mass. His narrator is more like a guardian angel of the cubicles, soaring above the oatmeal-colored carpet, possessing an awareness of its own but also able to zoom in and out of individual cubicles and the minds of their inhabitants. It’s kind of exhilarating, really.

And then it stops. The second part of the novel is rendered in traditional third-person omniscient. It’s hard for me to describe how upset I was about this transition. I felt betrayed. I thought that such a risky maneuver required total commitment to make it work, and I was disappointed that Ferris had lost his nerve. I also missed the collective narrator. It was funny and cannily observant and I liked it.

But I kept reading, and I am so glad I did. By the novel’s close, everything that Ferris has done makes sense. That middle section turns out to be the story of two characters, the one being written about and the one doing the writing. In restoring the possibility of individuality for these two characters, Ferris suggests that all his characters might regain their humanity—or, perhaps, that they never really lost it in the first place. This is a novel that will earn rueful laughs from office workers (and office veterans), but its appeal goes far beyond that demographic. This is a novel about people, and it’s wonderful.

* And at this point I can’t seem to help but mention that I just finished an advance readers’ copy of a strikingly similar book—set in an office, collective narrator—coming out this May. I’m not suggesting that the author of this forthcoming book copped his moves from Ferris. I would imagine that he was working on his manuscript well before Ferris’s book was published, and it’s impossible not to speculate about his state of mind when he first got wind of Then We Came to the End. Was it like seeing his doppelganger crossing the street? Did it fill him with dread? Did he call his editor immediately, or did he stop taking her calls for weeks? I don’t know, of course, but I do feel kind of sorry for the guy.

My Favorite Books of 2006: Reader, I Married Him by Michèle Roberts

NOTE: I read a lot of great books in 2006. I also had a baby, which is why I never got around to writing up my favorite books of the year. I trust that these books continue to retain their goodness, though, and I believe that there’s actually an upside to reviewing them so long after reading them: My comments will be brief and incisive, concerning only what remains deeply etched in my memory. Also, these books are available in paperback now, which means big savings for you if you feel compelled to buy any of them.

A couple days before my daughter was due in July 2006, I started reading John Crowley’s Little, Big. It was a book I had been meaning to read forever, and a sweetly weird fantasy epic seemed like it would set the right tone for bringing a child into the world. It’s a fat book, so I figured it would get me through my last few days of pregnancy and a labor of medium duration.

Well, Frances took her time getting born, so, when I actually went to the hospital, I had to pack the next book on the pile. That book was Reader, I Married Him by Michèle Roberts. As it turns out, very little about Frances’s birth went the way I had planned, and this darkly comic tale of romantic suspense, told by a wholly unreliable narrator, was probably better suited to the birth experience I actually had than Crowley’s wistful magic.