Your story from this week’s issue, “Finistère,” is about a middle-aged man who is travelling by ferry from Ireland to France after the implosion of his most recent romance. When did you start thinking of that premise?
I was on the same ferry from Cork to Roscoff when I started to write the story. It was a lovely, calm day in late summer, and I had almost sixteen hours ahead of me on the boat, and I realized I hadn’t written a story in ages. So I got my notebook out and started to try a few sentences. . . . I always think I know how to write a short story until I start a new one, and then the meltdown begins. But, of course, the journey offered a clean narrative shape, as all journeys do, and I knew quickly that the story would more or less begin and end on the boat. There is also a special kind of dreaminess about travel by sea—about the slower pace of it—that tends to make me very emotional, and this is the condition I need to be in to get a story.
The man, Cian John Wynne, is fifty-five and was until that morning in a relationship with a woman named Sylvia, someone “involved with design, with live poetry, and with a scheme to reintroduce the wolf to the province of Connacht.” Things had started off promisingly in the late spring but curdled by the end of the summer. Did you enjoy coming up with the details of this doomed romance?
Doomed Romances appear to be my stock-in-trade at this stage. If I were to hang out my writer’s shingle, those would be the only two words I’d need to put on it.
As I started to work on the ferry, Cian John appeared to me vividly and suddenly. I could absolutely see him on the boat—a large and fastidious and somewhat stylish dude who exists in a perpetual whirl of self-generated melodrama—and I thought, O.K., I can have some fun here.
In the ferry’s café, Le Café, Cian John, endeavoring to read a Rachel Cusk novel, finds himself next to a teen-age girl keen to engage him in conversation, and they start talking about the latest season of the Netflix series “Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons.” Why did you choose this show as the way to draw these two characters together?
I am a habitué of the more tawdry districts of all the streaming services. Around the time I was writing the story, I had been clawing at the walls waiting for the latest season of “World’s Toughest Prisons” to drop. Cian John and the girl at once find themselves to be kindred spirits, bonding over their shared devotion to the show. Or at least they bond in a kind of wry and sarcastic way, and this tone or note that came into their talk gave me important information: they are both still teen-agers.
Cian John tells himself that he shouldn’t be talking to the girl, particularly in his state of mind. Do you want the reader to feel any sense of queasiness as the conversation starts?
I’m not averse to giving the reader an “Uh-oh, where’s this heading?” moment. Very often I might then try to subvert the expectation of where the story is going to go. It goes back to tone and note again. I try to layer the tones in a story so that the reader, at least to begin with, is on uncertain ground. For example, if you get a laugh from the reader, that’s a pure and visceral response, and the reader is immediately more open to the story emotionally, and this is when you can take it somewhere darker and heavier and really twist the knife.
Cian John, having given in to an excess of feeling ever since he was a young man, tries to give the girl advice about love and sex. (“Leave it as long as you can,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s really nothing to get worked up about.”) Could he imagine any identity for himself other than that of a suffering romantic?
He’s never outgrown the image of himself as the swain, the young lover. But, the older he gets, this is a more and more difficult act to pull off, and we sense that he has become unmoored in life. The girl senses this, too. She can read him plainly: “There’s a kind of weird energy off you.” There’s a type of blithe and ironic tone to their conversation, but the story, as always, is going on just beneath the surface of the talk—this is always where drama resides. He’s telling her that everything is going to be all right. She’s telling him that his word and his experience are worth something.
The port of Roscoff, the ferry’s destination, is in the French department of Finistère, in the westernmost part of Brittany. Why did you decide to use that for the title? Does Cian John feel that he’s reached the end of the Earth? Have you thought about what he’ll get up to in France?
He needs a fresh stage and different scenery if he’s going to keep this act going. He knows at this point of a long romantic career that sometimes it’s best to just light out for new territory.
I still can’t decide if this is a very quiet story—in which a pair of strangers briefly finds common ground and a little solace on a ferry—or a very dramatic story, in which two lives are saved. The story has to do its work in the space between these two readings of it. Ultimately, I think the girl is going to be O.K. I’m not sure what comes next for Cian John. With regard to the title, I would say there’s a slight ambiguity in the last clause of the last sentence that troubles me.
You have a new novel coming out in July, “The Heart in Winter.” It takes place in Montana in the eighteen-nineties. This is the first novel that you’ve set in America. What was it like to leave Ireland behind?
