Y_our story in this week’s issue, “Sleep,” is narrated by an Irish writer whose relationship is put at risk by the nightmares he has about the death of his brother. The narrator’s circumstances overlap with your own, and the story has some of the rhythm and pacing of memoir. Do you want or expect readers to think of “Sleep” as autobiographical?_
I think that even in autobiographical writing your job is to create illusion, to work with rhythm and image and detail to make the reader feel that whatever is on the page matters and must have happened. The problem if you write directly and only from experience is that experience is thin and has no shape. For “Sleep,” I expect readers to imagine that something happened, enough to become the emotional bedrock of the story, a story that deals with what are, for me, pressing images.
What’s the appeal, for a fiction writer, of creating a character who is similar to oneself?
The poems of Louise Glück have made a difference to me as a prose writer. And there are other poets, too, who deal with personal matters in a tone that is intimate and urgent. Unsparing. In some of the fiction I’ve written in the course of the past decade, I have been trying to wield that tone. In this system, the self is a subject. It may be a fictional self, but the illusion has to be created that it is not fictional; the illusion has to be created that I have no time now for making up anything.
The narrator’s boyfriend, who has likely survived some psychological difficulties of his own, is so upset by the narrator’s disturbed sleep that he leaves him. It’s a somewhat cruel act. Do you think that we should feel sympathy for him?
Yes. I think we feel that the boyfriend is out of his depth here, and that going is the best way to deal with it.
The narrator’s brother died of a heart attack, a natural, unviolent death—sad, of course, but not extraordinary in its circumstances. Why do you think the narrator is so scarred by it?
I became interested in a number of powerful pieces of fiction that play with the notion of doubles—Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner.” It came to me that it was still possible to use this trope, by working with two brothers who seem to be two aspects of one self. Thus the narrator is not merely scarred; he is viscerally involved in the death of the brother.
The narrator undergoes hypnosis—a process that transports him into the mind, or what he imagines is the mind, of his dying brother. Is hypnosis something you’ve experienced? Do you think that it can provide this kind of emotional and psychological release?
Yes, I have undergone hypnosis and various other forms of therapy. I am not sure about “release”; maybe “knowledge” is the word. Hypnosis allowed me to know something. And that was the notion that within the self, or lurking quite close to the skin, is something haunting, hidden, strange but emphatically there, present and powerful. I find that with everything, including a walk down the street, I am more interested in how it can be dramatized in fiction than in what it might mean in life. That is a useful way of avoiding the subject, which is, I suppose, what the narrator is doing in New York.
The story itself is told in muted, lyrical, almost hypnotic language. Was the aim to make the sound of the story reflect its subject?
I was looking for a voice whispering, a voice saying something difficult and important and true. A voice that would speak only once.
The narrator is asked whether he hates the British, and he replies that that’s all over now. It’s easy to be Irish now—easier, in fact, than being Jewish. Do you think that’s true?
Yes. I think issues relating to history and heritage and legacy are more relaxed now in the Republic of Ireland. I am not alone among Irish people in liking England and feeling easy there. There has always been a rich interaction between the two islands—within families and also among writers and artists and, indeed, workers—even when things were fraught or poisonous between the two governments, or at a high political level. On the other hand, I don’t think that Jewish people have much reason to be relaxed about history or legacy just now.
Congratulations on making the Folio Prize shortlist with your most recent novel, “Nora Webster”! Do you think you’ll be putting together a story collection anytime soon?
There is one story still to be done, and then there will be a collection. It often takes years for me to write a story. I have the notebook beside me with a draft of the first part of that story—I work in longhand—and I notice that the date at the top of the opening page is “6 October 2010.” Maybe I will finish it before this decade is over.
