Annie Liontas: Influences, identity, and what defines the “self-respecting immigrant novel”

Let Me Explain You
by Annie Liontas
(Scribner, 2015)

Our series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry continues today with a post by Annie Liontas, whose debut novel Let Me Explain You arrives this week. Below she describes some of the key influences on her book, which recounts the travails of a Greek-American family in New Jersey.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. In writing Middlesex, Eugenides is said to have drafted 50 pages in one voice, picked up a new voice for another 75 pages, grown dissatisfied, and started over again. He did this for about nine years. For Eugenides, the narrative “had to render the experience of a teenage girl and an adult man, or an adult male-identified hermaphrodite.” This was further complicated by Eugenides’s desire to relay “epic events in the third person and psychosexual events in the first person.”

I could not have written Let Me Explain You without Middlesex. It was Middlesex that helped me solve the problem of structure in my own novel, and it was Middlesex that gave me a sense of scope. Middlesex confirmed my voice: it suggested I might have something to add to the conversation, even when scores of others have said their piece with far more eloquence. I am so intimately bound to Middlesex for its beauty, humor, and painful knowing of what it means to be foreign in our own bodies.

And maybe I steal a little bit of Desdemona for myself.

White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Any self-respecting immigrant novel pays homage to White Teeth, which works diligently to allow a multiplicity of voices to speak (this may be the very definition of an immigrant novel). Smith has a wonderful ear for how people talk and for what language sounds like when it’s making its home in a new country.

Smith wasn’t an immigrant herself, but she grew up around people “who had that experience, who felt separated or cut in two, who had moved from one country to another, who had the sense of leading two lives.” In White Teeth, the children of immigrants resist immigrant parents and claim their lives for their own, sometimes at a great price: assimilation brings alienation. In Let Me Explain You, this experience of exile—xenitia—visits a cost on the daughters of Stavros Stavros Mavrakis.

But White Teeth is funny, too. Smith says, “If I die and someone says, “She was a comic novelist,” I would be more than happy. My favorite writers are comic novelists. I don’t see any point in being anything else.” Me neither.

El Boom, particularly A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez—which remains my favorite book—but also The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes. I sought out The Death of Artemio Cruz when I was deep into Let Me Explain You, and I knew that what I had on my hands was a proud, stricken, narcissistic patriarch. I was looking for versions of Stavros Stavros Mavrakis in other novels. I got as close as a shadow to Artemio Cruz, to the indignation and fear of death, to the spite that he wordlessly hurled at his wife and daughter, whom he knew to be selfish and concerned only with his estate. He smelled incense on his death bed.

I mostly hated him, but I had to pay my respects to a man not long for the world. Everyone deserves their dignity, especially at the end.

Why the Child Is Cooking
in the Polenta
by Aglaja Veteranyi
(Dalkey Archive Press, 2012)

Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta by Aglaja Veteranyi.
Our story sounds different every time my mother tells it.—Aglaja Veteranyi

Aglaja Veteranyi, whom you probably never heard of, drowned herself in 2002 in Lake Zurich. A Swiss writer of Romanian origin, Veteranyi was part of a touring circus. Her stepfather was a clown and her mother an acrobat. She, herself, was made to juggle and dance. This is the subject of the novel Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta, which she published before she took her own life (other works released posthumously).

Vincent Kling notes in his exquisite afterward, having had the vision to translate the work into English, that Aglaja’s voice offers the “adult retrospective viewpoint but at the same time the child’s passage through successive stages of awareness.” Every line is touching, funny, or pained. Everything is true.

I read Polenta in a single sitting. I read it thinking, are you my mother? I read it thinking, you can be nobody’s mother. I stopped every few sentences to write something. I read and thought of all those stories of the old witch who fattens children up to eat them. I read Polenta and felt rage at not knowing the good-enough mother. I read it, and it helped me to write Litza as a child, suffering but resilient.

A graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program, Annie Liontas won a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and her short story “Two Planes in Love” was a runner-up in BOMB Magazine’s 2013 Fiction Prize Contest. For more than a decade she has dedicated herself to urban education in Philadelphia, Newark, and Camden, New Jersey. Slate calls Let Me Explain You a “sly and generous debut novel,” and Mary Karr has welcomed it as “a hilarious, fascinating, poetic work of fiction.”

Related post:
Joyce Carol Oates and Jeffrey Eugenides discuss “why we tell stories” at World Science Festival 2012

Previously in this series:
“Influences” posts by Jabari Asim, Deborah Baker, Kate Christensen, Jennifer Gilmore, Lauren Groff, Lev Grossman, Jane Hirschfield, Alan Heathcock, Adam Levin, Dawn McGuire, Dinaw Mengestu, Jim Moore, Manuel Muñoz, Maggie Nelson, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Geoffrey O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Carl Phillips, Karen Russell, Timothy Schaffert, Philip Schultz, Mark Statman, Emma Straub, J. Courtney Sullivan, Ellen Ullman, and Adam Wilson

Joyce Carol Oates and Jeffrey Eugenides discuss “why we tell stories” at World Science Festival 2012

From left, Jonathan Gottschall, Joyce Carol Oates, Jeffrey Eugenides

On June 2, award-winning novelists Joyce Carol Oates and Jeffrey Eugenides joined a panel of three scientists to address the question “Why We Tell Stories: The Science of Narrative” at this year's World Science Festival in New York City. The panel’s moderator, Jay Allison, who produces a popular venue for contemporary storytelling, The Moth Radio Hour, on NPR, described the session’s ambitious agenda: “Why do we have a primal urge to tell stories? Do they help us survive? Do they serve an evolutionary role? What happens in the brain when we tell stories?”

Much of the discussion focused on what storytelling’s role may have played in human evolution. Paul Bloom, professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University, profiled the curious place fiction holds in this context:

It’s no mystery why people would want facts about the real world: who’s sleeping with whom, where the food is—gossip is a natural appetite and a powerful one. It makes sense. But why would we want facts about people who we full well know don’t exist, and events that don’t either. Why would we spend our money, spend our time pursuing those things? That’s just an extraordinary puzzle.

Keith Oatley, professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto and author of three novels, devised an experiment to compare the performance of people who mostly read fiction to those who mostly read nonfiction. He asked participants to characterize what emotions they detected—fear, anxiety, desire—in thirty-six pictures of just the eyes of different people. The fiction readers performed decidely better than the nonfiction readers. Oatley’s conclusion: the “more stories—fiction—you read, the better you are at understanding people.”

At one point Oates questioned whether the panel was viewing storytelling too positively. “There are very negative kinds of storytelling. Paranoid schizophrenics have their stories. Sometimes they publish books, like Mein Kampf. And many people are taken in by them.” But Bloom pointed out that one of the most surprising findings independently arrived at in the research of all three scientists was the prevalent appeal of “the sad and the scary,” even at a young age:

The defining feature of many stories is that they involve bad things. Jonathan [Gottschall] sums it up in his wonderful book [The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human]: The core element that they share is trouble. You would expect kids rationally to avoid their worst fears, but they confront them. They dive into them. One solution to the puzzle which Keith has emphasized is that stories serve as a form of safe practice. There are horrible things in the world that we need to deal with. Just like play is often viewed by ethologists as practicing for the future, we practice in our imaginations. Maybe it makes us better prepared to deal with horrible things.

Listening to Eugenides read a passage from The Virgin Suicides prompted Oates to recall one of her motivations for writing:

One of the motives for creating art is a feeling of homesickness, that you’ve lost something. That’s very powerful and haunting and you can’t quite get to it in your conscious life. Through your imagination you’re inhabiting this invisible and palpable place. That’s one of the reasons why people write—that’s why I write--out of loneliness and homesickness you’re evoking this lost world.

The ninety-minute discussion covered much of what moderator Allison outlined—including scans of what a brain looks like when a person is reading Chekhov. Eugenides summed up many of the thoughts expressed during the evening in his closing comment:

I think it’s persuasive that stories exist to impose a meaning in a meaningless world, or a world we could fear is meaningless, regardless of the content of the story. The fact that there seems to be an order, and some sort of organization in the story is what we get from the story. It’s kind of our nutrition. As literature goes on, writers begin to distrust the simplicity of the stories that were written before and they have to start writing the little train that tried but couldn’t because all the other stories were about the train that could. . . . 

I just happen to be reading an Alice Munro story last night called “Cortes Island.” It’s about a young woman who’s kind of becoming a writer. She’s in a marriage that’s perfectly acceptable and new, but there are hints that it’s not going to be great in her life and she’s begun to read a lot and write and she gets interrupted now and then in her reading and the line is something like: “she would be interrupted at the point of astonishment the book had brought her to, the giddiness of gulped riches.” I’m often asked why I read. It’s sort of that astonishment that books bring me to and “the giddiness of gulped riches” that I get from reading. That’s going to have to be there in a hundred years in whatever form stories take or how they are delivered.

Also of interest:

• Watch a video of the entire discussion on the World Science Festival website
• Read the exclusive LOA interview with Joyce Carol Oates, editor of Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories, about Shirley Jackson
• John Cheever on “Why I Write Short Stories” (PDF) 
• Kurt Vonnegut on “the only thing you can teach” writers, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• The “Best” Short Stories? Two lists—one recent and one from 1914—show their strengths and limitations, a previous Reader’s Almanac post

Related LOA works: American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now (includes “Family” by Joyce Carol Oates); At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing (includes “Rape and the Boxing Ring” by Joyce Carol Oates)