Teenage memories serve author Elinor Lipman well
This was going to be the lunch where I asked Elinor Lipman probing questions about The Future of the Novel.
This was supposed to be the interview about serious milestones in the development of her own writing career, from the short-story collection "Into Love and Out Again" through eight novels to the brand-new "My Latest Grievance" (Houghton Mifflin, $24).
Instead, we sat down for lunch at the Alexis Hotel and talked, mostly about great moments in Lipman's fiction, but also about editors, our children (exactly the same age), the delicate art of reviewing a posthumous book, anatomically correct Barbie dolls, whether it is possible to ask for alternative salad dressings in a restaurant without making one's husband wince, and what it might mean to a teenager to discover that one parent had had an earlier, secret marriage.
I look now at my notes from the interview, scrawled onto a proper Seattle Times reporter's notebook. Normally they are tidy. These notes look like the path of an erratic chicken. No alcohol was consumed at this interview — on the contrary, plenty of alertness-inducing caffeine. But somehow The Future of the Novel just did not come up, because we were talking so much about how the current ones are produced.
Here is what Elinor Lipman is like. I was expecting someone hilariously witty and wise-cracking, somewhat on the order of a few of the smart-mouthed and occasionally edgy heroines of her books.
Instead, Lipman herself is a soft-spoken, sweet-voiced woman in her mid-50s, with eyes that have spent a lot of time in laughter (and are occasionally hidden behind trendy-looking round spectacles).
Instead of an East Coast business suit, she wore well-cut but not fancied-up jeans. She spent more time praising her editor than making bon mots, and much of what she said about her own work was completely surprising.
One example: Despite the brilliantly orderly plots of her finished work, when she begins a book, Lipman has absolutely no idea where it is going. She starts with the germ of an idea, then writes a first sentence and presses forward.
In the case of the new "My Latest Grievance," it was the idea about a teenager, the precocious and curious Frederica, who discovers that her joined-at-the-hip, aging-hippie-professor parents were not always married to each other. Her father was previously wed to the antithesis of his earnest, dowdy present wife — to the glamorous Laura Lee French, in fact.
Laura Lee suddenly emerges out of nowhere to become a housemother at the quiet Massachusetts college where Frederica and her parents live. Then all hell breaks loose.
Frederica is not Lipman's first adolescent narrator; the author confesses that she has "a pretty good memory of myself as a teenager, which helps."
"But I wanted Frederica to be an adult now, looking back at this tumultuous year in her life, with an adult's vocabulary and perceptions," Lipman said. "So I set the novel a little earlier, in the 1970s.
"And I wondered [of the secret ex-wife], 'Who would this dame be?' I realized she had to become a housemother, because I needed some way to get her together with Frederica" so Frederica's perceptions of her could be firsthand.
What about shifting the point of view to Laura Lee for awhile, as so many novelists do?
"I hate that," Lipman confides swiftly.
"Don't you? When the point of view hops back and forth like that, don't you think, 'Gee, I was just getting involved in the story from one viewpoint, and now I have to leave that story and go somewhere else?' I do!"
Not surprisingly, elements of "My Latest Grievance" are right out of Lipman's storehouse of personal experience. She fondly remembers a housemother at Simmons College in Boston (where Lipman majored in publications), a motherly figure who also was a children's literature anthologist.
Lipman herself was a resident adviser and worked closely with the housemother, a history that pays off in all sorts of collegiate and domestic details.
Grandiose interpretations in reviews of the "arc of the plot" and "transformation of character" in her books leave Lipman somewhere between startled and bemused.
"You don't think about these things, about Frederica's journey toward self-awareness and bridging the gap with her parents, while you're writing. You just write. I don't sit there and think, 'She is engaged in the process of self-discovery,' or anything like that."
Like so many masters of the comic art in film as well as literature, Lipman has had to contend with years of reviews that denigrate humor as if it made the work somehow second-rate.
Such reviews, she remembers, always carried a phrase like "Amusing though it may be ... " and concluded that a humorous book was really only good for casual diversion at the beach. That has finally changed.
"I've stopped being an apologetic humorist," she said, thriftily urging her interviewer to take home the salad that never quite got eaten because we were both talking and gesturing, and I was making those indecipherable chicken-scratch notes.
"I've started doing exactly what I want, and I'm having as much fun as possible."
Of course, it helps when you get an endorsement for being funny and undervalued from the likes of author Fay Weldon (whose 25th novel will soon emerge). Weldon's review of "My Latest Grievance" in The Washington Post uses terms like "this enchanting, infinitely witty yet serious, exceptionally intelligent, wholly original and Austen-like stylist," ending with a line that suggests the gods of literature are consumed with envy over Lipman's prose.
It's heady stuff. Weldon is not the first, nor will she likely be the last, to compare Lipman to Jane Austen. What's funny about this pairing is that Lipman's married name for the past 31 years is "Austin."
It's just as well she kept her maiden name as a novelist; otherwise, enchanted reviewers with "the divine Jane" in the back of their minds would have been misspelling her name as Austen all along.
And now, another novel is in the works. Lipman is 40 pages into it, and she has "really no idea where it is going," she cheerfully admitted.
"But I will find out," she said. "I think the hardest part is already behind me: I have begun."
Melinda Bargreen: 206-464-2321