Cathleen Schine

Cathleen Schine is the author of many novels, includ­ing They Do Not Mean To, But They Do (2016), Fin & Lady (2013), and The Three Weissmanns of Westport (2010, a rewriting of Sense and Sensibility) in the category of “middlebrow” literature and the idea of culture. I first inter­viewed this wonderfully funny novelist when I was in college, after the publica­tion of Rameau’s Niece and The Love Let­ter in 1995. This interview follows the publication of The Grammarians (2019). Along the way, we touch on the labels of feminist, Jewish, and lesbian writing; her love of research and reading Trol­lope, Pym, Mitford, and Gibbons; and the pleasure of being a comic author.

Certain genres still seem to be asso­ciated with the derogatory term “mid­dlebrow,” particularly comic fiction, despite being, as V.S. Pritchett pointed out, “a dominant tradition of the English novel.” It is also, one might argue, a dominant note in American fiction, certainly of the last century, from novels by Philip Roth and John Barth to Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. As this list suggests, the “high­brow” too often appears as a boy’s club (despite Zadie Smith making the grade), dividing the literary landscape: serious fiction with comic under- or overtones, often dark, written by men and “lighter” or brighter fiction (i.e., what some might call middlebrow) written by women. 

Helena Feder: While The Grammar­ians is funny, it addresses a serious debate about language and its proper usage. How do you feel about the pre­scriptivist/descriptivist divide?

Cathleen Schine: What struck me most forcefully while writing The Grammarians was the study of colloqui­al language that Laurel comes across, the book by Charles Fries. I had the same reaction Laurel did—those letters, or fragments of letters used in the book to illustrate certain grammatical truths, just broke my heart. They read like poetry. They carried with them so much truth. And that is, after all, what language is all about. So that made me think about the power of language in a different, a more expansive, way.

Feder: You mention in the acknowl­edgments that you were a “bad copyed­itor.” Daphne’s definition of copy editing is rather compelling. Where does this come from?

Schine: I revere copyeditors. They have saved me from such awful mis­takes. I was a bad copyeditor because I couldn’t spell. Forty years, eleven books, and many reviews and articles later, I have learned a lot. I am a better speller, but I still look forward to a copyeditor’s input. Copyediting with a thorough but light hand is an art.

Feder: Her assertion that grammar is “ethically good” holds water, but the way she unravels in her description of Laurel’s descriptivism seems to com­plicate this. Do you find, in the circles you travel, that Laurel’s view is becom­ing the accepted one?

Schine: That depends on which circle I am going around. My younger son, Tommy Denby, recently got a PhD in linguistics, so you can imagine the flood of excited and illuminating descriptivist information I’ve been getting for years. On the other hand, I am of a generation that has been fight­ing the language barbarians for years. And I worked as a journalist before writing novels, a field in which clarity and consistency in language was once valued so highly. I still come across the fussiest of language nerds who insist on useless distinctions. And I am sometimes one of them, although I no longer insist—I just wince and keep si­lent. Because I am old enough to have seen in front of my eyes the changes of fashion in speech which eventually creep into writing and to understand that phenomenon as inclusion rather than perversion.

Feder: Would anything be lost if stu­dents were no longer taught grammar as we were?

Schine: Oh, of course it would. Gram­mar should be seen as a tool, not a judgement. A knowledge of grammar gives you a better understanding of how language works, which in turn gives you a better understanding of how to make language work for you. I love grammar. 

And yet, grammar is a bunch of rules derived from Latin that were imposed on English. Grammar is also an inher­ent structure in language. Maybe the word structure has too many associa­tions. Let’s say a skeleton or better yet a nervous system that allows language to move its arms and legs and fingers and toes. Descriptivists like to look at that movement and describe it; prescriptiv­ists want to choreograph every step. My mother wanted the students to reach out and hold language’s hand. 

Feder: That’s a lovely, lyrical compro­mise. Your examples of the mooring and unmooring of meaning from language in the book—the color blue, the loss of loved ones—have social and philosophically implications. What might it mean for the perception of truth and for politics that my blue and your blue may be worlds apart? 

Schine: I think—or perhaps I hope—that recognizing differences in percep­tion can make us feel closer as human beings. The recognition that we are all different but still human and so the same. A nice liberal humanist stance, boring perhaps but I do feel that way when I’m in an optimistic mood and not raging against the world of Trump. And I do rage because there are facts. There is a sky. It is a color, whether it looks different to you or not, that we agree to call blue. The rejection of real­ity that we are seeing politically in this country is terrifying—not an original observation but a heartfelt one. That is not the fault of language but of the peo­ple who choose to distort it. And they may win over reality; in fact, they have already won in so many ways. That is a tragedy for language and, of course, for all of us. Meaning that, with or without “good” grammar, language will have to fight its way back from obfuscation. 

Feder: In your recent novels, your chapters seem to be growing shorter. Shorter chapters are effective in They Mean Not Mean To, But They Do as well. Joy’s life would seem to shrink as time passes but, instead, it clarifies into a significant image, a moment, a phrase. Were you after this kind of distillation?

Schine: Maybe, subconsciously. I also think that by the end of the book I know better what the book is about. I don’t have to wander around in prose searching for that. 

Feder: Were you working toward an inversion of Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”? Joy’s children do their best to fuck her up, in their turn.

Schine: Oh, yes, absolutely. I am of an age when many of my friends have ailing parents. And in my own life, my step-father had been ill for a long time and died, and then my mother was ill for a long time and died. It’s so frustrat­ing not be able to fix everything for the people you love. I noticed how bossy I had become in my frustration. My mother noticed, too! When you write, you change point-of-view, at least I did in this book, and I looked back at these grown children characters and just blanched. They were so officious and intrusive and self-righteous. Just like me! It was a terrible realization about myself, but wonderful for the book.

Feder: And it is a wonderful book. I know many writers have had a hard time working during the pandemic. Have you been able to write? 

Schine: I have had a hard time writing since 2016. I did manage to finish The Grammarians, though it was only because I was a writer-in-residence in Siena and had a room with a view and unbelievable food and wine and lovely people to speak to in the evening (and only the evening). That was the first time I needed real solitude to work. I’ve always been able to sneak in the time no matter what was going on. But these last few years have been so depressing. I couldn’t concentrate at all. I couldn’t even read. Like so many others. I spent hours on Twitter. I cooked a lot. And then, months and months in, I got so bored with myself and my inactivity that I started to write. That’s a new one for me. The bill collectors have been an inspiration to get to work. But abject boredom with my own soul? That was new.

I am currently writing a book about a Viennese family, the Künstlers, who emigrate to Los Angeles in 1939 to escape the Nazis. The daughter is twelve, and she encounters many of the other emigres who formed a colony of German speaking intellectuals, mu­sicians, composers, and writers. Part of the book is her telling her story of that time; part of it tells the story of her and her twenty-three-year-old grand­son who visits and gets trapped with her in her house in Venice, California during the lockdown of 2020. She tells him all of her incredible stories about Garbo and Schoenberg, the Manns and Brecht. So, it’s about exile, and also about stories—what they are, who they belong to, how to find your own. The working title is Künstlers in Paradise, and it will be out in March 2023.

Feder: The Manns, Brecht, perhaps Theodor Adorno too? We mentioned Larkin earlier, and I know you love An­thony Trollope and Barbara Pym. Your novels reference to so many authors, from Diderot to Mitford. And then there’s the pastiche…

Schine: Yes, Rameau’s Niece is pas­tiche. My first two books were rather autobiographical, and Rameau’s Niece wasn’t at all. There was an intense thrill reading works from the Enlight­enment, and the more I read, the more I understood that the Enlightenment was about desire, the desire to know. It was 1989, and the Velvet Revolution was going on. When I searched for something somewhat equivalent in the 18th century, I discovered another kind of desire, pornography used as revolu­tionary propaganda. 

Feder: Did you read any postmodern critiques of the Enlightenment?

Schine: I had read enough theory, more than enough, to satirize it in the book. But Rameau’s Niece is really not about theory; it is about desire. But I know that Rameau’s Niece has been taught as a postmodern novel.

What I finally have come to realize is that I love research. For example, reading Darwin for The Evolution of Jane (1998) was another revelation. It was exhilarating, reading a lot of biology, which I had never studied or under­stood. I read about morphology, about organisms’ mating behavior, about fac­ets of evolution that only made sense statistically. At a certain point, though, you realize you just want to write a story. You don’t want it to be a formu­laic thing where you’re playing against a text. When I wrote The Love Letter there was no text. At first I thought, “I’m going to read a lot of Colette and then I’m going to use this, and use that…” But, finally, I didn’t want it to be confined like that. Of course, the protagonist is a bookseller. There were books involved, but they were whatev­er I was reading at that moment. 

I still have to be extremely careful about what I read when I’m writing, because if I read something that’s not well-written, I steal from it just as much as from something that is beautifully written. Comic writing is to some extent mimicry. And that can be dangerous. With The New Yorkers I decided it was imperative to read all of Trollope. Trollope had nothing to do with a book about dogs and their own­ers in New York City, but I wanted that prose and scope in the background, in my thoughts and imagination. Or may­be it was just an excuse to read forty Trollope novels. I am a Trollope nut. 

Feder: Trollope is either lauded or passed over as “middlebrow.” The term still pops up all over the place, and its usage is so variable. When Virginia Woolf wrote “middlebrow” it was pure­ly an insult, for example, but now the term is often used to imply something is more socially engaged or authentic… or perhaps just pleasurable.

Schine: “Middlebrow” is the “bour­geois” of culture, right? A leftover term from another age’s battle. But there’s still a little sting to both of them, or there’s meant to be, even after pop­ular culture and mass culture have swept the real meanings away. If you are called a middlebrow, chances are someone is saying you are unserious in an important way. Do you know how I discovered Trollope? I was reviewing television for Vogue, thirty years ago, and the BBC had filmed, I think, The Warden. It wasn’t terribly good, but I read the novel before writing the review. And that was it. I became a complete Trollope lunatic, an acolyte. Trollope was considered middlebrow, and I discovered him in an almost ludicrously middlebrow way. I cherish the middlebrow; Je suis middlebrow! Even “middlebrow” as the term was used when I was growing up in the ’50s, when being a middlebrow meant you read poetry, you went to the opera, you went to museums, you went to the symphony, and even when you didn’t like what you saw or heard, you tried to like it, even if you only did it because you felt you were supposed to. You paid your money and you took your chance. It was part of being an upper-middle class person. You would like Puccini and not someone very, very new… Well, I like Puccini. That’s how a started to like opera, hearing Puccini. “Middlebrow” was always pre­sented to me as the people who were able to absorb “easy” art, and “real” art was supposed to be very difficult. That’s a real ’50s, modernist thing. And I don’t buy that, and I never have—well, maybe I did for a pretentious moment in my teens and early days, because that’s when you’re supposed to—but I think that it’s okay to have something you do not call art, but you call culture. Culture is not always chal­lenging and torturing; sometimes it is enveloping. Maybe that’s old-fashioned now, to make that distinction. 

Feder: We need culture in this sense, work that is smart and funny and touch­ing, and we need art too, and the im­portant ways in which it challenges cul­tural surroundings, particularly market values. But this can be a difficult thing to say because it’s seen as mandarin.

Schine: Mandarin’s a good word. I think the way “middlebrow” was used when it meant something to someone my age was against people who were just pretending to understand or appre­ciate art. Well, I love the 19th century, all of those works that I guess were considered easy or popular. They’re very appealing to me, maybe because they’re protected by being historically distant. I’m not as impressed by many contemporary popular authors. Maybe that’s my own form of mandarinism. 

Eventually, what I began to realize with my own work, to the extent that I have any understanding or self-aware­ness of what I’m doing, was that I read a lot. I realized this when I wrote The Three Weissmanns of Westport. I did not intend to write a book that stuck very closely to Jane Austen’s plot. My intention was to use it as inspiration to write about grown-up people, who fall in love the way that people do now, and about marriage’s financial reper­cussions. What’s culturally central now is not so much marriage but divorce, in terms of people’s economic well-being. Sense and Sensibility is densely textured, and my book contains probably one of its hundred threads. Yes, for me, read­ing and writing are so connected, that I can’t do one without the other and I don’t want to anymore. That’s part of the excitement and the fun for me. When I was writing my most recent book, Fin & Lady, the book didn’t really make sense to me until I realized that Lady gave books to Fin, and what those books were, and what Fin was reading. It became the engine of the book and the texture of Fin’s life. When I realized that Lady sent him books, when she didn’t know him, that’s when I under­stood her. She gives him Whitman as a bedtime story.

Feder: Isn’t Edward, Margaret’s hus­band (in Rameau’s Niece), a Whitman scholar?

Schine: Yes. I have Leaves of Grass on my phone and whenever I’m really freaking out it’s either Barbara Pym or Walt Whitman. Some of Pym’s novels are now available as ebooks. I discov­ered Rebecca West this summer. I was on a book tour—actually, I think it might have been at Quail Ridge books, in your area in North Carolina—and I was looking for something to read. I just picked up this book, The Fountain Overflows. It’s amazing. It’s hilarious. 

Feder: West was a wonderful novelist and reviewer too; she wrote the best review of Orlando when it came out. When we first spoke over twenty-five years ago, I asked you what were you reading, and you said that no matter what you’re reading you really just want to write a sentence like Randall Jarrell.

Schine: Yes, and it still hasn’t hap­pened. When I feel that I’m getting too sappy and flabby in my writing, I read Randall Jarrell. Especially the prose. I think one of the best passages in Rameau’s Niece is a brief moment when I was just able to channel his rhythm and got it for one paragraph. It was not a paint-by-numbers exercise, although if I thought that would work I would do it. It was simply a connection with a way of seeing, a momentary com­munication, as if I had turned reading inside out. I love to write except when it’s awful. 

Sometimes I’m plodding along du­tifully trying to make it through a few hundred words so I can quit and not feel too guilty, and I realize it is hours later and I’ve written pages and pages. Other times, I plod and plod and plod and after a week of plodding I read what I’ve written and it’s just as good or bad as those inspired hours. I rewrite endlessly. That’s the most gratifying; rewriting. The anxiety of what’s going to happen, of plot and who’s who, is calmed. It’s about making it good, find­ing the word, balancing the sentence, cutting the frou-frou foliage. 

Feder: Can we go back to Rameau’s Niece for a moment? The article Marga­ret’s going to write on teeth is horribly plausible.

Schine: I’ve never quite gotten back to that—the incorporation of parody into a novel. At that time I was also writing parodies, which I don’t do anymore, but I’ve gotten much more interested in plot. I’ve really tried to understand more about what a story really is. That was something that I thought that The Three Weismanns was going to teach me, because it’s so intimately involved with the Austen novel Sense and Sen­sibility. I was saying to myself: this is going to somehow rub off on me and I’ve learned how to do this now. But it’s not true. It’s something that’s not as natural to me as writing a paragraph or writing dialogue or writing a scene. I like the flabbiness of novels—well, flab­biness isn’t the right word—I like room to digress and to go here and go there. That’s something that I like when I read, and something that I like when I write. It’s comfortable, but there’s also real discipline involved, and it doesn’t come naturally. I really thought that, well now I’ve been living in the world of this master, so now I’m really going to feel exactly when to do this and when to do that, but no such luck. One of the great joys of writing that novel was having this perfect—absolutely perfect—plot to play with and jump into and jump out of.

Feder: Did you decide at the begin­ning that you would give your “Ed­ward Ferrars” a kicking?

Schine: The endings of books I don’t know when I start, because I have to understand how characters develop, to see where they really want to go and where they need to go, so the ending was a bit of a surprise. I didn’t know Betty was going to die, either. 

Feder: There are some very interest­ing overlaps between your novels. For example, Betty and Brenda in To The Birdhouse (1990). Alice, the protagonist, seems almost a placeholder, like Alice of Alice in Wonderland, for her lists and notes. Were you hinting at that with the title, To the Birdhouse? Her experience with her mother’s insane boyfriend is like a fall down Carroll’s rabbit-hole. 

Schine: In Alice in Bed, I think it was subconsciously why I chose the name, and certainly why I chose the title. To the Birdhouse—I wanted to call it Dance with Your Mother but my editor wouldn’t let me. A friend jokingly offered To The Birdhouse, and who could resist? No one’s ever discussed that novel with me seriously, and so this makes me very happy. The book is broadly comic, maybe that’s why. That was a book about stalking before the word stalking was used in that way. 

There’s often overlap in my books. The Brenda character shares my mother’s situation in the world, her age and time, and what I observed in her friends and the people around her. As does Betty in The Three Weissmanns. The mother is minor in Sense and Sensi­bility. But for me, she became what the book was really about. I am interest­ed in certain positions, certain roles within a family—it comes up again and again. Those girls were tough to write, Miranda in particular. It was difficult to make her real. 

Feder: What do you make of the “Jew­ish Jane Austen” tag?

Schine: That happened a long time ago. I think that was from Alice in Bed (1983). The publicity people thought, oh goody, but in fact that was a quote from long ago. Who can object to such a glorious sobriquet? At that time any­way, in 1983, any woman who wrote a novel that was funny and was relative­ly intelligent, and about a family, was called the “Something Jane Austen.” It is just a tag. If you wrote a comedy of manners, and it was any good, that’s what people would say, and I’ll take it. Thank you.

Feder: Jewishness plays more of a role in some of your books than in others. I love what Josie says to the girls about Christmas: Isn’t this a great holiday? Well, you know, it’s a holiday to cel­ebrate the birth of a person in whose name an entire religion persecuted our people. So why should they have all the fun?

Schine: Which is actually something I did say to my children. We celebrated Christmas when I was little, and nei­ther of my parents were comfortable with it. My father was very Reform Jewish. My mother was sort of, you know, a good-mood, Yiddish-type. My mother just felt, it’s fun, it’s festive, let’s do it. Then, when my kids were born, I thought, this is pretty bad, but it’s really fun. So naturally it’s the one holiday they really love, of all holidays, and that they consider a real family holiday. 

Feder: This leads me to a scene I’ve wanted to ask you about in Rameau’s Niece. In Interpretation of Dreams, Freud narrates a dream in which he’s wander­ing through a strange city; he’s getting lost and becoming anxious. He’s trying to find his way back to his hotel but keeps ending up on a street of “painted ladies.” I was thinking about Margaret, when she’s in Prague getting excited and anxious, trying to find her way back to her hotel. 

Schine: The whole Prague thing was very influenced by Kafka—I was reading Kafka—and it was also because I went to Prague, and I decided that Margaret had to go there, too. The Vel­vet Revolution—it was right after that. I went, and I had been reading all this Enlightenment literature about desire and the senses, and I walked around and could not believe my eyes. Prague is full of huge statues, and because the streets are so small, their feet are in your face, they’re intensely close, not like Paris with its big boulevards that give you some distance. It was reading Kafka, and then walking around be­neath big feet and thighs and buttocks, past the sausages in the shop windows. 

Feder: Isn’t Freud referenced a few times in the book, though, and not just by Lily? 

Schine: I used to be very interested in Freud. My mother went through train­ing in analysis, and she got a degree in psychology (like the character of Bren­da). She then went on and got a PhD in special education and worked with kids. She thinks Freud was very wise. And he was, except when he wasn’t.

Feder: And Fin’s neighbor, the little girl across the street, aren’t her parents analysts?

Schine: Yeah. Psychoanalysis was still the gospel in the ’60s. 

Feder: So, from Freud to Darwin. An amateur naturalist or evolutionary the­ory pops up in several of your books. There are pronouncements all the time in Rameau’s Niece about fitness, and of course there’s Alice, and The Evolution of Jane… and there are the dogs.

Schine: Because my mother was studying psychology and I was a horse nut, I decided I should be a horse psy­chologist when I grew up. There was no such thing then. You hit the dog with rolled up newspaper and called it a day. Now, I’ll have to go hit myself with a rolled-up newspaper in penance for even thinking of such a thing. The information we have now about animals and their brains and feelings, from crows to Elephants to whales, is remarkable. I watch a website called explore.org to see live streaming of Alaskan brown bears every spring and fall when they come to a certain river. I also watched a puffling hatch and fledge on explore.org. It’s the repressed horse psychologist in me. 

When I was in high school, I wanted to be a poet. I wrote pages and pages of bad poetry. I went to Sarah Lawrence with the idea of studying poetry writ­ing there. Then I looked around me, and first of all everyone was absolutely gorgeous. I mean, so spectacularly, fantastically cool and beautiful. All the guys, and all the girls. And I looked around and thought, I don’t want them to read my bad poetry. And so I didn’t take any poetry classes or writ­ing classes. I only stayed a year. I had nothing to do with literature or the English department. The only litera­ture class I took was medieval chival­rous poetry. After that, all I read was documents in Latin. I was illiterate, practically, when I got out of graduate school. I hadn’t read a real novel since high school. In high school I read very specific stuff. I read Colette. 

My mother was reading Collette, and I saw a few novels lying around. I read Colette and I read Dostoyevsky, because I went to the library and saw The Idiot on the bookshelf, and I thought it was going to be a funny book. So, I started reading it. I was very pretentious; I carried it around with me. I have lost the pleasure of really reading Dostoyevsky, because I read him in junior high school and couldn’t understand him. Then I read Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, The Possessed, and The Idiot. It took me a year to read each one and it’s just gone. I ruined my Russian Literature mo­ment. Oh, I also read Heidegger. I was a weird, pretentious kid. I didn’t under­stand what I was reading, except Co­lette. I understood Colette all too well, and loved it, but that was it. So, when I got out of graduate school and I started reading, it was a revelation. When I wrote papers, my goal was to write as if I were writing in translation from the German. To be an obscure academic seemed the height of being an intel­lectual. The less you communicate, the better. And the less you understood about what you were trying to com­municate the better. One day after I left and came back to New York, my boyfriend at the time had moved out, and I found a copy of Our Mutual Friend he’d left behind. I started reading it, and my whole life changed. I thought, wow, you can enjoy what you’re reading, and you can understand it on different levels. Look how a description of a man’s coat can be so funny and so revealing. It was an epiphany. Dickens changed my life.

Feder: I’ve noticed that of most of the authors you love write comic or darkly comic books, or books with a comic strain (among their works). You must like Stella Gibbons.

Schine: Yes, Cold Comfort Farm, I loved it. And I love Elizabeth von Arnim. Elizabeth and Her German Gar­den was a huge worldwide bestseller. I also like The Pastor’s Wife a lot. Have you read All the Dogs of My Life? I think she is now one of the most underrat­ed writers. Her feminism, though, is mixed up with her aristocratic thing. I was thinking at one point that I would love to write a biography of her, but I don’t speak German. I wrote an intro­duction to Enchanted April for a recent edition published by New York Review Books. It’s not one of my greatest pieces but reading about her and doing the research on her was so interesting. I think it’s an incredible book. 

Feder: Like Arnim, you write strong female characters.

Schine: I hope so, though I’ve never set out to write a book about a strong, interesting woman, and certainly not to show that women are strong or interesting. Feminism has made the world an easier, better place for me, but I don’t know that I’ve held up my end very well there. It never interested me when I was younger. I was defiant, but in a purely selfish way; I just wanted to do what I wanted to do. Thanks to many feminists, I got to do exactly that. I’ve always felt that I was lucky because if I were five years younger, I would have been expected to have a career. I was right on the cusp. Parents didn’t expect anything of girls. My parents were very supportive, and they thought I was a genius. Anything I did was wonderful. But it was basically, you know, marry someone who will earn a living and then you can write your novels, if that’s what you’re going to do. If I’d been five years younger, I would have been a miserable lawyer. I would’ve been expected to go to law school, and it would have to be lousy law school because I’m bad at taking tests, and I would have been a lousy lawyer too. It was a great luxury to have nothing expected of me.

Feder: Almost as if you’d benefitted from patriarchy! How often do people talk about your novels as gay novels?

Schine: Yes, in a sense I rode the wave… But how often do people dis­cuss my novels as “gay novels”? Not of­ten. “Chick-lit,” yes. Although I think that whole misbegotten category has mercifully been eclipsed by apocalyptic YA novels for grownups.

Feder: Did the gay turn in Weissmanns help to undo Austen’s knot?

Schine: I don’t know how to describe that except that it happened. I wrote it and then I thought, I can’t do this. I can’t do this to Jane Austen. Also, the last book had lesbians in it and I’m go­ing to be “a lesbian writer.” It was like, Oy, more with the lesbians? And then I thought, tough noogies everybody. This is the way the book went. 

Feder: It’s interesting that you haven’t been interviewed by gay publications, though you were a finalist for the 29th Annual Lambda Literary Award for They May Not Mean To, But They Do, and this same book won another LGBTQ prize, the Ferro-Grumley Award.

Schine: My characters don’t really fit or work as exemplary gay characters or as characters who are making a statement. They’re too worried about everything else in their lives. 

Feder: Your novels are gay in the way that they’re Jewish… it’s just part of the world of the novel.

Schine: Right. There are Jews in the novels, but I don’t think I’m consid­ered a “Jewish novelist.” Although in Europe, I have been compared to Woody Allen, and that has to do with a European romantic notion of the New York Intellectual comic Jew. The novel is comic, it’s set in New York, and there are Jews. Voila! Woody Allen. In the same way that there’s a woman, there’s a family, it’s a romance, a comedy of manners, it’s dry, must be Jane Austen. It’s shorthand, telling shorthand. 

I was briefly labelled a romance writer, because of The Love Letter. I don’t know if it’s better to have those labels or not. I do return to certain ideas in my books, most writers do. Even the curiosity and the adventure of a completely new subject has to contend with the questions we hav­en’t answered well enough yet, the interactions we haven’t understood well enough, the experiences we have not described well enough. It’s easier for the marketing department if a new book is not so radically different from the last book that it alienates your readers or disappoints them. The wom­en I met at readings at JCCs are not necessarily thinking they absolutely must rush to read a novel about a little boy in the ’60s. But if they do, they will recognize a voice and a constella­tion concerns and interests. 

Feder: How do you balance humor, ideas, and sentiment? Your novels are, of course, so funny.

Schine: Honestly, that’s all I really care about. If I can get a good joke in there—and sometimes it’s just a joke for myself—I’m happy. In Fin & Ladywhen Fin is reading the obituaries. He says, “Oh here’s someone named Faustina, what a funny name. Oh there’s somebody named Kat.” No one but me and the person to whom I am married are going to get that joke. Faustina is a cat in a Pym novel that we both love, and we particular love the passages about Faustina. I was reading obituaries from the period, trying to find dates, trying to see who died when. I was looking for famous people, but I saw Faustina and then I saw below it someone named Kat, and I thought I’m putting it in. It’s totally irrelevant, it doesn’t do anything, but this is for me. This is a joke for myself.

Helena Feder is Professor of Literature and Environment at ECU. She has published one book, Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture, and essays and interviews in various venues. Feder is the editor of two new collections: You Are the River and Close Reading the Anthro­pocene. She is currently working on a book of public-facing environmental essays and a book of poems.

Excerpt

from The Grammarians

“There is something fair and just in what we do,’’ she said to Becky one day. “Grammar is good. I mean ethically good. If you think of all these words just staggering around, grammar is their social order, their government.”

Becky, her face drawn and sallow, her cheek smudged with ink, put a cigarette in her mouth but did not light it. “I’ll never quit smoking,’’ she said. “How do people quit?”

Daphne said, “Grammar makes you respect words, every individual word. You make sure it’s in the place where it feels the most comfortable and does its job best.”

Becky flicked her lighter. “Mm-hmm.” Slowly, she let the flame touch the end of the cigarette. Slowly, she inhaled. “You can’t quit, just so you know. It’s a myth.”

“Every part of speech is as deserving as every other part of speech.”

“Mmm,” Becky said, with great satisfaction, smoke dribbling from the sides of her mouth. “Yes, it is. It’s in the Constitution, I believe.”

“Sometimes, okay, a word needs to be led. Or nudged. Or dragged. Or squeezed a little. To get it to the spot where it belongs.”

“Or cut.”

Daphne said, “Well, last resort.” 

“Different styles, you and I,” Becky said.

Daphne thought, Yes, thank god for that. Becky was wearing the same old pilled sweater the color of expensive mustard, which smelled faintly of mothballs.

Becky tapped the manuscript she was reading. ‘”I came home to him stumbling, peeing, and hiding,”’ she read. “Now, which one would you say is stumbling, peeing, and hiding? The guy who came home to the junkie in his house, or the junkie? Then he writes, ‘I gave him a bath in my shower with most of my clothes.’ Do you think he means most of his clothes were in the bath sloshing around with the junkie? I mean, come on, people.’’ 

“But the point is, any collection of words can be copyedited with pleasure. Even this wash-the-junkie-intruder crap. Because we are bringing order to the world of wash-the-junkie-intruder crap. This is the best job I’ve ever had. Thank you, Becky.” 

“You’re welcome,” Becky said. “Personally, I’d rather get laid.”

Excerpted from THE GRAMMARIANS by Cathleen Schine. Copyright © 2020 by Cathleen Schine. 

Published with permission from Picador. All rights reserved.