PHOTOGRAPH BY STEWART FERGUSON / CAMERA PRESS / REDUX
Your story in the Summer Fiction Issue, “Two Men Arrive in a Village,” describes what happens when two strangers appear in a close-knit community. The title contains within it the unspoken question of what will happen next. It could be the first line of a joke, or an opening to something much darker. Did you always have this title in mind for the story?
The story came all together—title, everything. I sat down in a café in Calgary, the idea came to me, and I wrote it in a few hours. That’s never happened to me before.
The story traces events that unfold after two men arrive in one particular village, yet it also embeds a universal narrative in this description—these men could show up in any community, on any continent, at any time, bringing with them chaos and violence. When did you first think about braiding together the specific and the general? Was it challenging to switch between the two, or was this integral to the voice from the outset?
After I wrote it, I realized the story had two sources. One was going to see the Romanian movie “Aferim!” I didn’t like it: I thought it was excessively boring and thrilled with its own brutality. But it had this archetypal setup of two men going around a country terrorizing people, and that part stuck in my mind. The other source was a conversation I’d had with an old school friend who is now an economist, a couple of months before. He had given me a fabulist novel by a Hungarian writer, which he liked very much; it was a kind of allegory of the historical traumas of Hungary. Characters were called “The Grandmother,” “The Soldier,” and so on, and I wanted to like it, too, but I couldn’t get over my resistance to this idea of mythic archetypes. I said this to him, and he said something like “Well, your fiction is so obsessively local, but there’s another, more universal way of writing that has a different kind of power.” And then I was annoyed by the word “universal.” But weeks after I was still thinking about what he’d said, exactly because he wasn’t a writer or a literary academic but simply a smart reader who is often moved by what he reads. I started thinking of all the ways the local and specific enable one kind of engagement and potentially block another, particularly when you’re talking about violence. “Oh, that’s just what happens in Africa,” or “Well, Eastern Europe has always been like that.” Sometimes the specific details allow us to hold certain situations at a distance. The conversation with my friend made me wonder: Is it possible to write a story that happens in many places at many times simultaneously? That implicates everybody?
Were there any particular writers or works that you had in mind when you were writing “Two Men Arrive in a Village”?
Not when I was writing: then I was just in the flow. But afterward I saw some attempts at thievery from Kafka and Beckett, writers I teach or have taught, and who are able to write stories that manage to exist in both modes, that are at once very specific and somehow also have the broad strokes of myth.
You recently finished your fifth novel, “Swing Time,” which is about two girls who dream of becoming dancers, and which will be published in the fall. How do you divide your time between working on stories and working on a novel? Are you able to switch between the two modes easily? Are there any thematic links between this story and the novel, or are they poles apart?
“Swing Time” took up all my time and energy. Sometimes I just cheated on the novel out of a despair that it would never be done: an essay on Schopenhauer, this story, a few other things. It’s a relief to turn to shorter work when you’re stuck in a novel. I think some of the thematic links might not all be clear to me, being still so close to them right now. There is a geographical connection: the village we glimpse in the story looms larger in “Swing Time.” But the obvious connection in my mind is that both the novel and the story are about imbalances of power. What happens when the weak meet the strong without protection.
