I had decided to retire the literary Would You Rather series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!
We are joined
today by Robert McKean. Although each book works as a stand-alone, populating Robert's novels and stories are some five hundred characters—all residents of Ganaego, a small
mill town in Western Pennsylvania. McKean’s short story collection I’LL
BE HERE FOR YOU: DIARY OF A TOWN was awarded first-prize in the
Tartts First Fiction competition (Livingston Press). His novel THE
CATALOG OF CROOKED THOUGHTS was awarded firstprize in the Methodist University Longleaf Press Novel Contest. The novel was also named a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. MENDING
WHAT IS BROKEN is being released by Livingston Press. Recipient of
a Massachusetts Artist’s Grant for his fiction, McKean has had six stories
nominated for Pushcart Prizes and one story for Best of the Net. He has
published extensively in journals such as The Kenyon Review, The
Chicago Review, and more. McKean is a graduate of The University of
Chicago. He now lives in Newtonville, Massachusetts. For additional information
about McKean and his Ganaego Project, please see his author’s website, robmckean.com.
What made you start writing?
I grew up in a small mill town in Western Pennsylvania. At
the center of the town’s economic life was the immense steelworks. In a small
town everybody knows everybody, or thinks they do. On my father’s side were
wonderful storytellers, my grandmother, my father, my aunt. I remember dinners
where the tales—usually touched by irony, the follies and foibles of human
nature—wound round and round the table. On my mother’s side were scholars and
teachers. My grandfather, a classical scholar who read Latin and Greek, chose
to work in the steel mill, but remained a thoughtful reader all his life. One
of his daughters, my aunt, was a renowned English teacher for more than forty
years and a poet. On that side of the family, writers were extolled and books
revered. My oldest brother went into business, my middle brother opted for
math, and so it fell to me, I decided, to be the family’s writer.
Describe your book in three words.
Rueful, truthful, pixilated.
Would you and your main character(s) get along?
I think of the five hundred or so characters that I have
created as a vast repertory company. I usually get along with whichever
characters in the company with whom I might be currently working, some
famously, some at a respectful distance. Now Peter Sanguedolce, protagonist of
my latest novel, Mending What Is Broken,
is a Rittenhouse Manhattan man and I remain a Bombay white label martini man,
but, once we put that noble difference aside, we would talk of family myths and
burdens, swing and classical music, the perils and pitfalls of business life,
the greater perils and pitfalls of married life, and books, books, books. Peter
and I share the same laconic sense of humor. I’d recommend that he lose some
weight; he’d be disappointed in my sales.
What are you currently reading?
I always am reading at least two books. I call them my
morning read and my afternoon-evening read. The morning read is something I work
my way through a few pages at a time every day as I eat my oats. Much more
enlightening than the cereal box. Tomes usually, e.g., The Essays of Montaigne, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Herodotus,
Thucydides. My current morning read is A
History of English Prose Rhythm (1912) by George Saintsbury (1845-1933).
Could be the most insightful book I have read on what makes prose stutter, sing,
or soar. This is my second time through it. My latest afternoon-evening read
was the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. I am now reading Franz
Kafka: The Complete Stories.
What’s the single best line you’ve ever read?
The broken, heart-sick King Lear kneeling over the body of
his daughter Cordelia (V, iii) confronted with the bleak recognition that he
has squandered his kingdom and his pride and now has lost the one child who
loved him, all through his arrogance and vain foolishness. He asks his slain
daughter why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life and you no breath at all?
He whispers that she will come no more, “Never, never, never, never, never.” Five
nevers, an unutterable, unbearable line.
What is your favorite book from childhood?
The Wind in the
Willows. Mole, Ratty, Mr. Toad, Mr. Badger, and Kenneth Grahme’s gorgeous
prose have never been far from my side.
If you were stuck on a deserted island, what’s the one book
you wish you had with you?
A devastating question. A writer without books is a lost
soul wandering the wilderness. Do recall John Donne, Death is the ascension to a better library. But if I must, I’ll take
The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, the
battered, trussed, and much beloved volume I have carried everywhere since graduate
school, 1969. But might I plead for a two-week sabbatical every year to revisit
my bookshelves?
What are some of your favorite books and/or authors?
Let’s limit it to authors of fiction. 17th
Century: Cervantes. 18th Century: Sterne, Austen. 19th Century:
Tolstoy, Thackeray, Flaubert, James, Elliot (Mary Anne Evans), Chekhov, Melville. 20th
Century: Woolf, Paustovsky, J. Roth, Joyce, Mahfouz, Faulkner, O’Connor, Bulgakov,
Calvino, Bellow, Lowry, Wright, Nabokov, Grass, Marquez, Trevor, Döblin, DeLillo.
21st Century: P. Roth, McCarthy, Mantel, Saramago, Saunders, Livesey,
Wilson.
If you could remove one color from the world, what it would
be and why?
My wife and I decided that in our first apartment we would
paint the living room a vivid elegant green. Ignorant of painting techniques,
we were not aware that such brilliant colors requite a color under primer. And
oddly enough, the hardware store to which we kept returning for additional cans
of paint as we put down layer after layer futilely trying to cover the mottled
streaks didn’t tell us, either. Exasperated at last, we painted the room
battleship gray. Not long after, the living room became my office as I founded
a business. The business was successful, but the gray walls were like living
eight to ten hours a day, seven days a week, in a prison. I hate gray, I loathe
gray, I would cast gray into the deepest pit in hell. Why not, instead, substitute
one of the three new primary colors we know nothing about that Muskull
discovers on Arcturus?
What do you do when you’re not writing?
I have been baking whole grain sourdough bread for fifteen
years. And still learning. I was sympathetic during the pandemic as I read
about neophyte bakers bemoaning their rocklike loaves, “Why aren’t my sourdough
loaves rising? What am I doing wrong?” Ah, let me tell you what a delicate and brutal
art the manufacturing of sourdough bread is. White flour, easier, if not a
cinch; whole grain, no less treacherous than mountain climbing. One needs to
keep in mind the three T’s: temperature,
time, touch. The first two are mechanical. Controlling the temperature in winter
in a cold, drafty house may be a challenge and an even greater challenge in the
humid days of summer, but can be managed. Patience is learned, or, for the truly
obtuse, hammered in. The third, like writing fiction, constitutes a lifetime
Sisyphean journey.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Peter Sanguedolce, big-hearted and far too trusting, thinks he is only
fighting to save his shared custody rights to his daughter, Jeanette, only
to realize that he is really fighting to save her, the person whom he
cherishes most in life. Overwhelmed by life’s challenges, Peter ultimately
finds his way through. In this bittersweet story about the families we
make and we lose, about working class towns and fading dreams, Robert McKean gives us a subtle riff on The Merchant of Venice, as
well as the touching and often funny story of a
man creating his own second chances in life.
