Poured Over: Noah Hawley on Anthem
“I describe it as a fantasy novel about the real world we live in, or a realistic novel about the fantasy world we live in.” Anthem is Noah Hawley’s terrific, page-turning sixth novel, and his first after his Edgar Award-winning bestseller, Before The Fall—it’s also our January 2022 Barnes & Noble Book Club pick. Noah joins us on the show for a wide-ranging, spoiler-free conversation about breaking the fourth wall, the death of satire, how we can use fiction to help us make sense of a nonsensical world (even when our brains are working overtime “to maintain the illusion we believe in.”), writing for the screen vs. writing for the page, and more, including the ways Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings inspired Anthem. Featured books: Anthem by Noah Hawley, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, White Noise by Don DeLillo, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus eps on Saturdays) on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
From this episode…
B&N …You made some style choices in this novel that I wasn’t totally expecting…
Noah Hawley: I’m a firm believer that the content of a story should dictate the structure of a story….And what I struggled with here is what is at heart a very heavy story without wanting to write a very heavy book. And I thought, Well, who has done that? And I thought about Kurt Vonnegut, and I thought about Slaughterhouse-Five, in which, you know, he presented both a fictionalized version of his World War II experience, but also had himself as a character in the book….And so, I thought, well, let me see if that solves my problem here, which is, I’m worried about this world we have in our children’s future. And I know you’re worried. So, let’s talk about it. Not behind some fictional shell, but me as the author going, I’m worried you’re worried, let’s figure it out together.
B&N: One of the great things you do in Anthem is you break the fourth wall and at multiple points in the book, suddenly the narrator pops up….
Noah Hawley: So, so much of the last four or five years has been of the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up variety. You know, every day, it felt like you would get another news item where you know, something that had never happened before was suddenly the new normal. I just sat down to write a book about people. But I thought, Okay, well, when is the story taking place? Is it 10 years ago? Is it today? Is it five minutes from now? And so literally in trying to figure out when the book was set, I had to figure out what would five minutes from now look like. What does today look like? Well, how did we get here? You know, in doing that, I was really just trying to reflect back the world I see around the story. And so the story became somewhat absurd. And yet, you know, it’s not a satire. It’s not a comedy. I say in the book, Irony without humor is just violence. You look at a Kafka story of a man who’s on trial for something, they’ll never tell him what it is. It’s like we had a president who was elected and on his inauguration day, it was raining, and he swore that it wasn’t raining. And if you showed him a picture of the rain, he would deny that that was a real picture. And like, it would be a joke, except what he’s trying to have power over is truth itself. You know, so the joke is on you. If that’s the rules for the world, then how do you tell a story that feels realistic? That’s all I tried to do.
B&N: I want to switch gears slightly for a second because you’ve talked about Kurt Vonnegut‘s influence on Anthem. You’ve mentioned Kafka. There are also references to A Clockwork Orange, which I’m going to assume in this case, given the physical descriptions that went with it, It’s the Kubrick film rather than the Burgess novel, yes?
Noah Hawley: Yeah.
B&N: The Lord of the Rings obviously has a place in this, Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. Stephen King‘s work, we even have Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies and The Boy Scout Handbook. Yeah, I think I caught all of them. Oh, wait, there was a reference to Mad Max too.
Noah Hawley: There is, yes.
B&N: …Are those all of the creative influences on Anthem? Are there others that you didn’t really reference in the book?
Noah Hawley: I mentioned Marquez, there was a lot of research that went into that book in a nonfiction sense. I was in the middle of the book, you know, we took a family trip, and I went to the bookstore. And I tried to buy all the books that I’d read as a young man who never went and got an MFA, who taught himself to write like, what are the books where I thought, Oh, you can do that. In fiction, I bought The Unbearable Lightness of Being, you know, Milan Kundera with this sort of essayistic fiction, who turned ideas into story. Definitely. Song of Solomon, I bought, again, even if I owned it, I’ve just got new versions, White Noise, The Virgin Suicides. I’m sure there were there were others that were revelations to me in the craft of writing that I wanted to revisit, because it is my sixth book. And at a certain point, the engine gets going and and I thought, No, I want to go back to the beginning and go Well, what inspired me when I was becoming a novelist. And so that was a really fascinating exercise.