The 40 But 10 Interview Series: Robert McKean

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. 17^th Century: Cervantes. 18^th Century: Sterne, Austen. 19^th Century: Tolstoy, Thackeray, Flaubert, James, Elliot (Mary Anne Evans), Chekhov, Melville. 20^th Century: Woolf, Paustovsky, J. Roth, Joyce, Mahfouz, Faulkner, O’Connor, Bulgakov, Calvino, Bellow, Lowry, Wright, Nabokov, Grass, Marquez, Trevor, Döblin, DeLillo. 21^st 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. 

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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.