A Reading by Jumpha and Jonathan

I always seem to find out about readings by authors I like too late. In New York they are always going on at various bookstores, but I always read about them in a back issue of New York Magazine a week after they've happened. Manu, however, is more on the ball, and a whole week in advance he invited me to a joint reading by Jumpha Lahiri and Jonathan Franzen. Lahiri is perhaps best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection _The Interpreter of Maladies_ which I finished at 2:00 A.M. on an air mattress in Anthony and Jane's living room floor about a year and a half ago. Franzen wrote _The Corrections_, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer. (I don't remember where I was when I finished it several years ago, but I find myself thinking about it a lot, which is the mark of any good piece of writing as far as I'm concerned.) I learned at the reading that he's also a prolific author of non-fiction, journalistic-type pieces.

The reading was a fundraiser for Lahiri's kids' school, the Waldorf School, in Brooklyn, a very new-age-y kind of place for wealthy families that has an unconventional instructional approach and organic everything. Apparently she's really involved in construction of a new library there. It took place in the auditorium of The New School, which I'd never visited before. After a late start, a very nervous moderator, apparently also and author and parent at the school, introduced the authors and babbled for a while about how much time they'd all put into discussing and planning the event. Based on his struggles to lead discussion later, it didn't really show.

Lahiri read first, two sections of a new novel she's working on. She didn't tell us the name, probably because it most likely doesn't have one yet. For a change, it's about an Indian kid in the Northeast... Of course it was beautifully written in a very elegant, understated way. Actually, that phrase describes Lahiri herself quite well. She has a soft voice and a shy, serious demeanor. Next, Franzen boisterously read a non-fiction piece called "Emptying the Skies" about illegal songbird hunting around the Mediterranean, which appeared in The New Yorker in July of 2010. It was funny and exciting and fascinating all at once. Lahiri is, very obviously, a splendidly accomplished writer, but Franzen can make your jaw drop. I'm often nervous about whether authors I meet will live up to my expectations; I want them to be delightful people, when often the antisocial, too-introspective, socially awkward types are the ones who have the inclination toward literature. Franzen was exactly the way I wanted him to be: sharp, witty, insightful. I'd like to have a martini with him.


After the reading, the moderator inexpertly led a discussion, which started off with a series of statements that kept dead-ending when he realized that they weren't going to lead to questions. Franzen pointed out that both he and Jumpha were more than capable of interacting with the audience if they'd only be provided with something to answer. The audience had passed in a fair number of index cards with questions on them, but the moderator largely ignored them. When he was finally able to stagger out a rather uninteresting question about geography, both authors jumped on it and discussed it at length - anything to prevent the mic from being passed back to the moderator, it seemed. Lahiri spoke about the way that, for her, people define a place more than the place itself does. The daughter of immigrants, Lahiri's cohort served as a more significant atlas than the geographical location. She also talked about setting a story in an Italian village she'd never visited, based entirely on a tourism video she got her hands on. Years later, she found herself visiting the village and taking copious notes, even though the story was already published.

Franzen spoke about the role of research. Surprisingly, he feels facts are confining for a writer of fiction, and he'd much rather write things they way they seem like they should be. (One of the protagonists in _The Corrections_ has Parkinson's, so I was surprised to hear that Franzen eschews research, since he must have had to do a lot of it to follow Alfred through his deterioration.) On other hand, he said one has to pick facts that speak loudly when one is writing non-fiction, since the piece is essentially a series of facts cobbled together. I'd always heard that authors love research, but I guess I tend to read about research only after I finish a work of historical fiction, and obviously authors drawn to that genre are going to have a propensity for it.

Now that my copy is signed, I refuse to read it. I just checked one out from the library.

After the reading, we stood in a long line to get books autographed, then went to a hip restaurant not too far away for a decadent dinner with Manu's glamorous cousin and her entourage, which included her assistant, her co-jewelry designer, and a married Brazilian singer-songwriter-musician couple. Our final stop of the night was a Southern diner-cum-hip-hop lounge with retro album covers all over the walls and tables shaped like records. I can't say it really fit with the theme of the evening, but it was certainly a nice way to cap things off.