Interviews
Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Adam Johnson
Adam Johnson pursues the subjects of his fiction in much the way an investigative reporter chases a story. He spent seven years researching his Pulitzer-winning novel of life in North Korea, The Orphan Master's Son, eventually visiting the country in order to capture as much as possible a sense of ordinary life in that very extraordinary place.
But as the short stories of his bravura new collection, Fortune Smiles, demonstrate, Johnson is a literary sleuth bent on uncovering the astonishing in every corner of the twenty-first-century world: post-Katrina New Orleans, a former site of state-sponsored torture in Berlin, a near-future Silicon Valley in the wake of a president's assassination, and even — perhaps most darkly — the inner world of a man wrestling with monstrous urges. In the collection's title story, Johnson visits Seoul in the company of North Korean refugees who might have stepped from the pages of The Orphan Master's Son, and who discover in their new home a world as hard to understand as the nightmarish society they've left behind. What all of Johnson's characters — and readers — encounter, is something previously unimaginable, and utterly convincing. As one of the refugees remarks about the climactic events of "Fortune Smiles," "This was . . . spontaneous and unexpected, this was real."
Sitting down to talk about his fiction during the frenetic round of signings and events that made up May's Book Expo America in New York City, Adam Johnson is a warm and serene presence, whose manner reminds one of a professor used to the task of putting new students at ease in a seminar — a skill that may well be practiced among his students at Stanford. Our conversation ranged from the dislocations of life in a world where technology is perpetually challenging our notion of the real to the responsibilities of the writer to the world his work describes. The following is an edited transcript of our talk. — Bill Tipper
The Barnes & Noble Review: When I read "Nirvana," the opening story in the collection, the phrase, "The ghost in the machine," immediately comes to mind, in both a literal and thematic sense. This is a story about caring for a partner in illness — but also about drones, the Internet and mourning. Can you talk about how you came to write this very layered story?
Adam Johnson: Well, it came out of real life. My wife was having health issues, going through breast cancer, and it was tough on our family and our kids and everything. Right at that time, my college roommate, an old friend, took his life. I really couldn't process that. I didn't even really want to go to a funeral at that time. So I didn't. But when we were at college, my buddy was obsessive about Nirvana, and that's all he would play in the house, and so it was always playing. I found myself listening to that music again. Kurt Cobain took his life in 1994, just after we were done with college, and that music started really speaking to me, and for a long time I listened to nothing else. I really felt my friend's presence.
BNR: This was after your friend's death.
AJ: Yes. That's how I deal with things in life. I just write a story or something. And cancer is such a loaded issue because it's so poorly handled in popular narratives, in TV and things like that. So I didn't want the reader to bring any baggage. So I got a different kind of illness that was maybe fresh to the reader.
BNR: She starts suffering constantly from this illness, as well as in real doubt about whether recovery is really possible.
AJ: That's a real aspect of the illness. Joseph Heller did have this, and wrote a very interesting memoir about it. I had a friend in graduate school who got Guillain- Barré syndrome out of the blue, was paralyzed for a year. His dream for a year was to urinate on his own, he told me. He was very depressed, and they couldn't guarantee him that he would recover because not everyone does. But I had a dream one night that a drone came to the window and, in my dream, I went to the window, and there was just a little drone hovering there, and I just knew that this was a visitation from my dead friend in my dream-emotion logic — I still get goose bumps remembering that. I thought, You know what? I'm just going to start a story with that, because it's obviously connected to something else — see where it goes.
I don't remember how I invented bringing people to life . . .
BNR: Just to explain for someone who hasn't read the story, because it's such a fascinating, on-the- edge-of-possible-now kind of concept, the protagonist of the story is a software developer who has come up with a way of gathering up all the video on the Web, collecting it through an algorithm . . .
AJ: Right.
BT: . . . and assembling all the video about a particular person into a kind of responsive display that will project a lifelike hologram of a person you can talk to — in this case an image of a recently assassinated president. That went so quickly to the heart because I think so many people have had worries about our first black president being assassinated, the sense of fear that it might happen, and also the sense of closeness that we have to certain public figures. And that comes through in another way, because the wife in the story obsessively listens to Cobain.
AJ: I live in Silicon Valley. People always say, "Oh, your work is a little over the horizon, it's a little futuristic." But I commute from San Francisco to Palo Alto to teach. That's where they practice all the Google cars. So the driverless cars have been passing me for four years as I drive to work. Mercedes is testing its driverless cars in San Francisco now, and these silver cars drive around with no one in them. It's come to be normal to me.
BNR: You're already sort of living a little bit into tomorrow?
AJ: I think if you're right there in the home of Google, in the home of Uber and Lyft and all these companies are there, and artificial intelligence, the Stanford robotics labs, there are drones, solar cars driving around Stanford campus. Popular Mechanics wrote an article about that part of "Nirvana," about whether it could be done, and they concluded that it could be done now, that if you could really get an algorithm, we have enough of a Web presence, it could be curated and maybe assembled into some type of similar experience. One of my students graduated, and she was a great short story writer. They often get hired into companies like EA, to write software. She wrote a dialog-bot that fools people online into thinking that they're talking to humans.
BNR: There are very interesting Twitter- bots that are out there . . .
AJ: I met a man last week who wrote a novel from the perspective of a Twitter-bot. I think it's going to be a popular novel. Because a Twitter-bot doesn't really understand what it is, and who made it, and what its role in the world is as it comes to think about the strangeness of humans. But that's an old trope, to understand humanity from a non- human perspective.
BNR: It's not hard to find in your stories characters who are, for one reason or another, experts in particular areas of recondite knowledge. In the story "Interesting Facts," a woman suffering from cancer catalogues all of these facts about her illness and the treatment. There is an intent over and over by your characters, it seems to me, to be like the inventors of Silicon Valley, to master the world through deep technical knowledge, to catalogue everything, to sort of tag their experience of the world with finely-grained knowledge. Your fiction throws them into a confrontation with something that cannot be mastered in that way.
AJ: Well, I feel like the world is bewildering in its vastness and complexity. I think to just become an expert on yourself is almost impossible, let alone understand the motives and inner workings of humanity, and what it means to live in a world of such scale. Maybe I'm just projecting my own bewilderment before the monoliths and multi-liths that are out there. But how does a human make its way through a world of 7 billion people and all these other meanings, and still find a meaningful path to chart one person's meaningful course?
Jared Diamond, who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel and many other interesting books, came to Stanford. One of the things he said that really spoke to me is that the worst thing that ever happened to human beings was that they stopped being hunter-gatherers. They started this little explosive arc into what we call civilization. We honestly really believe we're meant to be close-knit, transient, tribal, communal, mystical, storytelling people, and yet we've made this thing.
We're in the Javits Center now, this steel-and-glass thing. And I love this amazing society. But it's inhuman in the world, it feels to me in many ways.
BNR: Is fiction then an attempt to find humanness within that bewildering architecture that we've created?
AJ: Long dramatic pause. Fiction is many, many things. I will say this, because that invites me to make a big pronouncement . . .
BNR: I didn't mean to set up a loaded question. Perhaps a better one would be: So where is the storytelling impulse for you important?
AJ: I will say that I think contemporary literary fiction is most alive when it is like jazz as an art form. It's in-conversation, it's improvisational, it's terribly intimate and personal. All the writing I like is writing in which a writer is trying to discover, and whenever someone tells me, "Oh, I outlined my novel" or "I knew the end first," I think, "I don't want to read that book." I take elements . . . I took in "Nirvana" my wife's illness, the loss of a friend, a troubling dream, my sense of the world around me, and I just started writing. A story, a narrative is a meaning-making machine. It must make meaning because it's operating on so many levels — structure, causality, chronology, voice, language — and it all combines to make at the end a wave of meaning.
So if I put what's going on in my life into a story in the right way, at the end, the distance of fiction in its improvisational, meaning-making way, will deliver unto me a meaning that I couldn't have come to on my own. That's why I write. Sometimes it's like, duh — it's an obvious meaning that I should have seen. Maybe if I'd just gone to therapy I would have figured it out. But sometimes it leads to ponderous, complex answers that I must dwell upon.
BNR: Speaking of therapy — the experience of trauma seems central to many of your stories. I was thinking about the way in which one of the hallmarks of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, is the inability to stop repetitive thoughts or behavior related to the wounding experience. I went back to a story, "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine," and the line, "If this place was so horrible, how come you keep returning?" Is trauma something you think about consciously a lot?
AJ: You know, I haven't been traumatized in a big way. But for several reasons, I really care about the topic. I often believe that the How of the story is just as important as the What of the story, and trauma narratives take very specific shapes, but are very unexpected and surprising and interesting. I think when it comes to trauma, there are people who go through events that tear at the fabric of normalcy, and some people turn their feelings off in an effort to deal with, and some people can't stop feeling it, and the trauma is everywhere, and there's loops and repetitions and hauntings, and it's ever-present and everything leads back to it. So in "George Orwell" we have some guy who has totally dislocated his feelings . . .
BNR: He's a former Stasi in what was East Germany — a Stasi prison administrator.
AJ: Right. And he encounters a former inmate for whom the trauma is alive every day. They had opposite experiences, or opposite ways of dealing with the same experience.
I went to Germany for the German edition of The Orphan Master's Son, which was very popular there. That Korean experience of partition, Communism, freedom also rings true for the Vietnamese. My book is very popular in Vietnam, in Germany, etc. — some of the Eastern Bloc countries.
German television wanted to interview me. They said, "Oh, there's torture in your book; we have a torture prison." I said, "I don't want to go to a torture prison." They said, "No, it will be great." They took me to this place called Hohenschönhausen, a secret Stasi prison. It was a very creepy place, and it was very alive with the suffering that had once taken place there. But it is now a museum, as it is in my story, and the man who ran the place was a very intellectual person dedicated to turning this into a place of good. He took me on just a personal tour — so I did not go on a tour with a former inmate, which is how it really works there. But as we were walking, I asked about the former wardens and whether they all were brought to justice. He said, "No one. There's been no accounting for this." He said, "in fact, the warden still lives in his prison warden's house a block away. He walks his little dog around here every day."
I kept thinking about that for months, the old prison warden going around. So I knew he was a real figure. I made sure to Google nothing and learn nothing about the real man. I still don't know his name. I know he's real and he does exist.
My tour of Germany went to seven different cities, and I became fascinated. I would tell people, "I want to try to understand this East German Stasi culture." Because I'd been studying the Bowibu, which is the North Korean equivalent. I said, "Is there a book from a former Stasi agent in which he explains everything and just comes clean?" They said, "No. No one would ever write such a book." I said, "is there one voice that I could turn to of someone who just explains why they did it, or the machine they wee caught up in? — the human side of the offender." They said no. That's what made me write this. There was a voice missing that only literature could fill in.
BNR: Let's talk for a moment about the title story of the collection, "Fortune Smiles." Was there unfinished business from completing The Orphan Master's Son — did you feel, "There's another aspect of this that I want to go back and deal with?"
AJ: That's exactly it. When I wrote The Orphan Master's Son ?- the topic was so big. I feel like I got to a real emotional truth. But after I was done, I felt some facts weren't done justice to. It's such a large human thing that one portrait isn't enough. So after I was done, I wrote nonfiction pieces. I went to Japan and I found Kim Jong-Il's sushi chef, who escaped, and I interviewed him six times. I just wanted to write a big inner look in Kim Jong-Il's life in terms of getting one of our better portraits of Kim Jong-Il based on this. So I wrote several pieces of nonfiction about the broken history of literature in North Korea, and things like that.
But I think the novel implied at the end that if you get out, all your answers, all your dreams will come true, even though I knew from talking to defectors that a whole new set of problems had just begun. And I didn't want people to think, "Yes, they got out; it's easy now; they've won the lottery" or whatever, because I knew from talking to them, how hard it is trying to adapt from that society to a modern society... and society in Seoul is one of the most modern on earth. Some people can't handle it.
I spoke specifically to a couple of high-level defectors and did multiple interviews with two of them, who were like the guys in the story. If you're an elite in North Korea, you probably run scams to get hard currency, and the scams in the book are exactly the ones they reported to me, that we know to be true. Even they, the people who had cars in North Korea, who lived in Pyongyang, who had all the luxuries, could not cope well with the new world. The disillusionment, the bewilderment, the uncertainty, it just broke my heart — and the lack of acceptance in the South. The pejorative terms they have for North Koreans. They instantly become "dishwashers."
People say to me — this is a criticism (if it is a criticism) that I embrace — "Who are you to write about North Koreans? You're not Korean. You're a white guy in California." And that's true, and I own it. But the thing is, North Koreans aren't free to tell their stories. They cannot speak for themselves. And South Koreans are not taking up the flag of telling these stories. The people who get out are traumatized, and they want to look to the future, not to the past. But knowing that being an outsider to Korean culture means I'll get some things wrong, inherently. There will be trespass, and I apologize for that to the degree that it's there.
But sometimes being an outsider means that you can see things that are so clear to someone who is not within the paradigm, and I feel like that was really true of writing a story about Germany. I maybe got several facts wrong, but I can look at this without all the cultural baggage, without any investment, without my family dynamic being at stake, and paint a portrait that, whether it's right or wrong, brings a new humanity to it. With literature, you can project your humanity onto a situation, if we are all really humans who feel the same things.
There's a story in the collection, "Dark Meadow." It's a very troubling story.
BNR: About a man who is sexually attracted to children. It's a hard story to read.
AJ: It was a very difficult story to write. I have a friend, a therapist, and he runs a rehabilitation group of sex offenders in the prison system, and helps them transition once they've done their time. He has this set of stories of real people, some of whom are victims, some are offenders, some are both, who have become the ultimate pariahs in our society, and about whom most people would say they've lost their humanity. I don't believe that. They're real people who have done the worst thing we can imagine. But he sees their humanity. He sees their struggle. He sees them confront what they did and try to become other than what their worst moments were.
I'm a parent, so this is the worst nightmare ever. My wife and I go on Megan's Law, which is the registry in California, and we're like, "Who are the creeps in our neighborhood?" So part of writing that story was me confronting my fears, but also I said to my friend, "I just would love to read one narrative in which someone says, ?This is what I did; this is how I came to be a person who did this; and here was my path toward coming back or reconciling or something.' " And he said, "There isn't one." He said, "It's in the therapeutic literature, but there is not a book . . . " And he said, "I don't know that anyone would buy it." I said, "I would want to understand that person." Again, just that seed — there was a missing story within the realm of being human. My mind just started trying to imagine . . .
The one thing he talks about is these people's struggle, and it is not visible. He said, "Every minute of the day they are battling interior demons that they cannot share with anyone but others like them in my group sessions." And those are characters we care about. Really, I think that's what makes us care about this character, is that we would consider them a monster from a distance.
BNR: Does writing from these various points of view give you a sense of what we can't see about ourselves in America, our blind spots?
AJ: Well, I could say several things. One thing I'll say is that North Korea has set up one of the ways in which terror is inflicted upon the population — a David and Goliath thing, and we are the Great Enemy. So now America has been written into their narrative. Part of capturing a North Korean perspective in The Orphan Master's Son was critiquing America constantly. The one place in the world you can't talk to a North Korean is in North Korea. It's illegal. So when you go there, you're only handled by minders who have graduate degrees in handling foreigners. They are very skillful. When you're with them, they're trained on dealing with Americans who come to the country. They can name all fifty states, the capitals of all the states, they know the population of New York. But of course, they're not worldly, and they don't know the essence of things. So when I was there, like, North Korean elites would ask me: "Is it true that in San Francisco homeless people lay around in the streets and people don't do anything?" That's true in my neighborhood of the Haight, and I would say to say "Yes." They'd be like, "But why does the government not help them?" That was like a really genuine question. Of course, their definition of government help is much different than ours.
They would say, "Is it true that there is no health care?" They would say, "Our health care isn't the best, but everyone can have it. Is it true that you don't care about sick people in America?" I would have to say yes. This wasn't just propaganda ploys. They were curious about how we were so obviously rich and powerful, how we did not care for the underclass.
I asked my students all the time at Stanford, "When the future reads our books, what will they judge us for?" We read books from the nineteenth century that don't question slavery or colonialism or the rights of women or things of that nature. I ask them, "What will they judge us for?" What my students say has changed over the years — the rights of animals, how animals are treated. Gay equality. And the climate. I just asked this question of 110 freshmen at Stanford a couple of weeks ago. They said: They're going to read our books in 100 years and say, we just drove around in SUVs and consumed stuff and didn't even think about taking long showers or what-have-you.
—August 27, 2015
