GARY STHEYNGART : Daze of Heaven...

-How did you start writing ?

-GS : I started writing when I was very young, about four or five, I grew up in Leningrad, and my grandmother wanted me to be a writer very much. She said : ‘For every page you write, I’ll give you a big piece of cheese. It was terrible soviet cheese, but so she would pay in cheese and I loved cheese so much that I wrote and wrote ! My first story was about Lenin, I loved Lenin, and there was that big statue just outside of my house, and in Leningrad, people called him ‘The latin Lenin’ because he looked Latin American with his cap, very nice, so in my story Lenin meets a goose, a magical goose and they fly away for Finland and they have all those adventures, Lenin and the goose...

-So it’s a little bit like ‘Nils Holgerson’ ?

-GS : Yes, maybe a little bit ! So I’ve always wanted to write. And then we came to America, where of course nobody reads or write, so it’s all television and magazines, but I was sent to a very conservative Hebrew school, very dogmatic, so what I did was I wrote a parody of the Torah, I write on an actual scroll and it got me into a lot of trouble ! But the children really liked it, it was passed around, and I’ve really got that feeling that one could win friends with subversiveness ! And then I came to college, and there I had some professors who were very encouraging, and I started writing this book when I was twenty one, twenty two. I just came back from Prague where I spent some time, and it really excited me. It was a beautiful place but filled with all those expatriot who all thought they were Hemingway or Gertrude Stein ! They worked but they didn’t have any talent, no talent. Prague felt to me like a part of my story too because it was very eastern European of course, Czech is a Slavic language like Russian, it was like a collision of the two worlds, I knew the pretentious American intellectual world and the world of Eastern Europe, so all the themes I needed were there, so as soon as I came back to university, I wrote this book. And I thought it was so stupid that I threw it out for five years until another professor, Chang-Ray Lee, discovered it and got it published.

-What have been your influences?

-GS : Nabokov, to begin with, and it is a question of style : there’s so many ways to tell stories nowadays, films, video games which have become modes of narrative, graphic novels, so I think, if we want novel to survive, we have to realize what the essence is about : so many novels I read these days are just film scripts, very light but also in that mode of thinking with the camera eye, dialog with camera eye, and novels have to do more. For me Nabokov did so many things with one sentence, some of the stuff has almost a genre quality, the early stuff especially, crime stories are brilliant stuff. Then, from the perspective of a Jewish family, I would say Philip Roth, he broke so many taboos, and still now, which is amazing, he still continues to do it. I just bought the last one and can’t wait to get back and read it. He just keeps changing and changing, writing about the same thing and the same place, and yet, each one is a new revelation, a new glimpse pf his own personality in some ways, but also how one can write about the American experience ? He's a quintessential American writer. Another big influence on me, who's not widely read in the US, is Mordecai Richler ("Barney's version"), the Canadian writer. A great cynical view of life, of Canada, I think he's an absolutely brilliant man, ‘politically incorrect’.

-What are your favorite books ?

-GS : Nabokov’ ‘Pnine’, Tourgeniev’s ‘Fathers and sons’, "Portnoy's complaint", ‘ Herzog’ by Saul Bellow, and some Virginia Woolf, ‘to the lighthouse’ maybe.

-In what way is the character of Vladimir close to yourself ?

-GS : I would say fifty five per cent ! I wish I were more criminal, but I can’t do that : I can’t take that final step into criminality. But the family, the mindset, the unability to assimilate into American society, especially after the last election. It's a satire and in a way, it's Russian maximalism, so everything is very exaggerated of course : my mother is not as obsessed and criminal as his mother but I think I was much closer to Vladimir's mindset before I finished writing this book, so in a way there’s maybe something cathartic, probably in the sense that I can move out of my own life.

-Do you think that your book could be compared to American psycho’ , in the sense that, in the end, Bateman haven’t killed anyone, everything was in his mind, but if he could, he would have done it ? Do you think you could go...

-GS : ...and do all the other stuff ? It’s like a dream ! Maybe. When I came to America, I dreamed of success in a very big way, not literary success but financial success, because I was very poor and I went to a school that was very rich, and the children were always making fun of the Russians because we didn’t have the clothes and the money, so I think that like many immigrants, I dreamed of financial success in a very big way. I saw that movie, ‘Wall Street’, and I thought the lesson there is not to get caught, and only gradually I started to realize that sort of fallacy, the fallacy of the American dream, the do-it -at-all coast kind of phenomenon, and this book in a way plays with both ideas : it is a book about the American dream, and I think it’s a very American book in many ways, despite its Russian protagonists and despite the other facts, America is about the immigrant experience, and continues to be an immigrant nation, maybe more Mexican or Korean than Russian Jewish the way it was once, but it will continue to be an immigrant nation. America soaks everybody up, and there’s good things about that and bad too of course, a kind of uniformity : America is not Italian or German or else anymore. There are two nations : the coastal nation and the nation of the interior, and they have nothing in common. You may as well look back to the civil war, with the Northern and the Southern states. And actually , this division still exists almost completely, the south, with Mississipi and Dixieland have one set of values and the North has another, and there’s always a battle for the middle.

-But the habitant of the east and the west coast don’t seems to love each other that much...

-GS : Now we're coming together, after the Bush’s reelection disaster, we’ve seen that we have a lot in common than apart !

-Was it a surprise for you to see Bush reelected ?

-GS : I knew from the beginning that Bush would win, I had this feeling, I looked at the statistics. Americans don’t like people who read books, they hate people who speak French, and they hate anyone who has any kind of introspection : to them, anybody with culture in untrustworthy, you can’t trust somebody who reads books, God knows what you can find in these things, with the Bible you know very much what you have, but who knows about this shit ! The Bible is all you need ! I saw the statistics which showed that 42 per cent of the electors are evangelical Christians, and with that, it’s very difficult to win an election. But in the end, a week or two before, the numbers were so good so even I started to believe it was all gonna be over, and then of course, November 3rd, I looked on line for the Canadian citizenship application ! What a shame. It’s four years, but the damage from these four years will be irreparable I think.

-In Europe, we have nice people too, but not on the same scale !

-GS : No, not on the same scale...

-The bad thing is that now he’s got the right to do what he wants...

-GS : Yes, that’s terrible : he has the mandate.

-Well, back to you now ! How was your family environment ? Were there many books around ?

-GS : A lot ! The best thing my parents did was that television was not allowed in the house, until I was fifteen, sixteen years old. All books, and Russian books too. Tchekov, Dostoievski, Tolstoï, and in the house we only spoke Russian, not English. So that was very good, because I maintained my Russian, and also insulated myself a little bit from the American pop culture, which is good. When I was allowed to watch TV, and I remember that the first time I was allowed to, I watched it for 20 hours, I couldn’t stop, because all the references I had heard from children on the street suddenly I understood, they came into context, but what a context !

-What have been the reactions of your family when they read the novel ?

-GS : You know, this book was the first book which came out about Russian immigrants, a book of fiction by somebody from my generation. It was a shock, because my parents really thought, as most immigrant Russians thought, that the stress of the immigration fell on the adults and that the children had very happy American childhoods, but that wasn’t the case at all. And a good thing that came across the book is when I go out and meet Russian immigrants to make lectures and talk, there’s a feeling of surprise that it wasn’t as happy they thought it was, that opened up a lot of things, because I think a lot of the stress does fall on children : the parents have to struggle with things like language, etc, but they have this kind of mission, they feel. They work hard but they feel that their children will succeed, so at least that’s what they’re doing it for, but the children don’t have such a mission, so it becomes very ambiguous : are you Russian, or American ? Vladimir has a lot of these questions himself...

Vladimir hesitates about that...

-GS : I hesitate, I do : people have an instinct, a sense of social interaction but, when you are so bi-cultural, things become more difficult. In New York, it is easier, because everybody ‘s from somewhere else, so that makes it much nicer, but I could imagine growing up somewhere in Ohio or Montana or a small city of Texas, and I hear there are Russian immigrants in these places. I'm always shocked, I don’t know ! I bet for instance that they would speak only English at home, couldn't speak Russian, I guess they would try to be as American as possible...

-Do you believe in destiny, even through your character, who try to break things, but at the end, he’s kind of prisoner of his fate, he hesitates.

GS : I believe in destiny for my characters because I control them, and I love playing God ! That’s one of the good things about writing, this incredible sense of control ? A lot of people don’t like the way the book ends, but I do, because, for him, mediocrity becomes a kind of reward : with the kind of problems he has, it’s impossible for him to continue living at the speed that he lives throughout the book. As for myself, I don’t believe in destiny. It just may be a very American way of looking at it, but I do think one can really change one's life very dramatically : I was going to end like him, it was all set for me. I think it’s very possible to change one's own life, but one needs a good psychiatrist or something, or a good partner.

-A good partner is often better than a good psychiatrist !

-GS : Absolutely, but it’s easier to find a good psychiatrist in New York !

-How come Vladimir is not killed, when he comes back from Prague to America by all those thugs and killers ?

GS : He goes to Ohio, and nobody really knows what that is, if you go to New York, of course ! In my idea, Ohio exist only in a different plane, where you can hide ! I bet one could. The only connection is along the coast, and yet, nobody knows anybody : He may as well go to Siberia !

-Do you come back to Russia sometimes ? And if yes, how did you find it ?

-GS : I go every year, for a week, for Russian Christmas. It’s a real disaster. I love cities more than country. I love St Petersburg. All the money is in Moscow, but Petersburg, that beautiful city, is falling apart completely. They do a Potemkine village thing where the main street is nicely rebuilt, but if you walk a few blocks, that’s very sad. Sure, it was no paradise, but it was a nominal middle class country. Now it’s a third world country, there’s just no other way to look at it, men die at 56 on average, and the average income is lower than Turkey's, it’s a very poor country, and it’s shocking to think that's were I came from, we think of ourselves as being from St Petersburg with its intellectual centers and beautiful European city, but when I come back, it’s like a combination of Paris and Calcutta : beautiful facades, very European mindset, and yet brutal and growing poverty.

-An do you think that, at the contrary, if you had grown up there, you would have liked to go to another country ?

GS : I bet that, if I had grown up there, I would have become more like Girshkine ! To be honest, I think I would be eaten alive in Russia. I don’t have the instinct. A lot of people do, they become very wealthy individuals, and the new book I’m writing is about the son of one of the wealthiest Russians. It’s an amazing thing, it’ s a dog-eat-dog society, even more so than America obviously. The people who win win big, but everybody else loses terribly . All my friends there have very difficult lives.

-Would you consider one day going back to live in Russia?

-GS : Well, I have always said to myself that if Russia became a normal country with a normal government I would spend at least half the year there in St Petersburg. I would buy a place there if it was a normal country, but the next ten or twenty years don’t look so good ! I’d love to, I’d love for Russia to give up these messianic ideas, much like the United States have, that they have that big great mission to contribute to the world and just become a normal country, where people live normal lives and a government that cares for them instead of just using them as fodder for war, as cogs in the feudal system almost.

-And do you think that the collapse of the iron curtain and the fall of the Berliner wall precipitated all that ?

-GS : Well, this book is set in 1993, that's when I was in Prague, and someone says to Vladimir at one point that in five or ten years it would be another Munich, and it’s interesting because there really are two sides : in the iron curtain there was a second iron curtain, and we see what happens. Whenever I go to Prague, which is still not a very wealthy society, but my God, it’s light years ahead of something like Ukraine, you see things happening in countries like Ukraine, this new revolution which to me was a complete shock that I didn’t expect, I didn’t expect people to be so educated, so well informed and so brave. It’s shocking when I just couldn't see that happening in Russia. So there’s different degrees of it : I think the collapse of the iron curtain really divided Russia and certain Russia-like countries, like Belarus, Eastern Ukraine, divided them from countries that think of themselves truly as Europe, because Russia's always unsure and Russian intelligentsia have no idea: "we're Western, we're Eastern…". So many Russian writers now have turned to Buddhism, which has a nice California flavour to it. It’s such a swamp of insecurity and lack of focus and need to compete with the West, and Dostoievsky’s idea that only Russia is pure, and only Russians can show the world : first build a nice supermarket, do something for the people so they don’t live in this filth !

-Those countries have become a big market for Europe and USA, like China today, and of course the mafia of those countries has increased...

-GS : The future is China, yes ! The mafia is just another word for aristocracy, I think, in a weird way. There’s this tiny little sector of society that's always been connected : a lot of it comes from the communist Nomenklatura that was there before, and they’ve always run things, they continue to run things. That’s also the stupidest mafia, I purposely made them very stupid : when I travel to countries like Azerbaidjian or Georgia, I feel incredibly smart. Azerbaidjian has tied Nigeria as the most corrupt country because it means there’s more to steal, so they ‘re quite happy of that ! The world is fascinating, and Americans know nothing about it. It’s shocking to me. They are so convinced, like Russians, that they have some kind of superior civilization and they have no need for anything else. Fourteen per cent of Americans have passports and so only 14% of Americans leave the country, and that is a shocking statistic for a country that wealthy that has such possibility of travel. And that’s a big tragedy, I think. Nobody understands how these people live, and if anything, I try to bring a little of that to some reading public. If there's any good I do other than just entertainment, I would hope that that would be it.

-It’s important to travel, see things, not to stick to your own ideas, or no ideas at all...

-GS : No idea, except the ones dictated by your priest, or rabbi, or imam...

-Did you feel the weight of the family, represented in the book by the mother, the father and the grandmother ?

-GS : Of course this book is an exaggeration, they are less oppressive, but, when I talk to my fellow Russian Jews, there’s a pattern, a very anxious concerned mother, a kind of dreamy depressed absent father and an incredibly loving grand mother, who, because the parents are working, will always take care of you. I think that this pattern is very similar, with some degrees of difference !

-You talk a lot about integration in your novel, but don’t you think that ultimate point of integration is globalization, to reach a point that you can buy the same things throughout the world ?

-GS : You know, there’s good and bad about that : many things I can buy in Paris I can buy in downtown New York for sure, or in Finland, or almost in Amazonia, like APC or Agnes B shops, that’s bad because in some ways it takes away from the specificity of the place, people buy the same, look the same, that's the bad part. The good part is that I’m very wary of nations : I don’t like nations, I don’t like what they represent, and, as the world becomes more and more the same, nationalism should, in theory, but not always, recede. That would be the good part, less killing, I think of the world in terms of cities, gigantic metropolitan areas and to me, that mixture of people is enlightenment, this huge mix of people, I love that, New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Tokyo, big cities, or Sao Paulo, Mexico city : the future is in gigantic cities, and there will be, hopefully, a lot a the good things I talked about, a feeling that everyone can belong, and there’ll also be the fact that that store in front of us will be replicated on my corner ; but what are you gonna do ?

-Tell me about those girls, traveling through the book : Challah, Francesca, Morgan...

-GS : I love American women, I think they’re great, they’re very much maligned everywhere, but, well... ! In a way, this book can be seen as a celebration of the very middle American girl, with very big thighs ! I think they’re sweet, and I’ve known girls like that all my life ; and that I was in Prague with a girl very much like this who’s very angry at the way she's portrayed, I think there’s a very tender quality to this, they seem more adventurous that American men, more curious ; they have, like horses, these blindfolds, but it can be moved back, while the American men just go forward and forward. More women voted for Kerry, and more men for Bush. In each election it’s the same : men vote for theses assholes and women vote the other way.

-And the present governor of California ?

-GS : I hated him at the beginning, but he supports abortion, he supports gay marriage, stem cell research, which is very important, he’s not religious : by far, he’s not the worst of these people. But, to go back to girls (yes !), these girls, maybe I’m old fashioned, but I think that a novel should work through love, always ; without that, who cares ? Family and love should always be in a novel, even a post modern novel, without love or sex, it’s pointless to continue I think. So, in this book and in the book I’m writing now, for instance, it turns on relationships, and I think falling in love with the locals, they will tell you more about yourself than anybody else in the world !

-And, at the end, does he make the good choice or the easiest choice ?

-GS : Saul Bellow talks of his characters as reality instructors. With him usually, it's these men who lead young men into the path, and for me, I think women are reality instructors : the best way to learn a foreign language is in bed with someone ! That goes across the board, the best way to do anything , this isn’t bad.

-I’ve heard that you had asthma problems...

-GS : Yes, and the fact is I’m very sick right now, on the plane somebody sneezed on me ! But it switches when you get older : I haven't had it for ages ! It creates terrible stress and anxiety...

-So my question is, when you wrote this book, did this anxiety disappear and writing made some good to you ?

-GS : Yes, it felt great : I did really start to feel better physically after having finished to write this book ; but also I think being sick is great for your imagination as a child because, with that you’re kept away and don’t socialize. You become more Proust-like, I guess ! And I had terrible asthma, Leningrad is the worst climate for it, it's built on a swamp, with negative thirty degrees temperature : you can’t get any worse than that ! I remember that, at some point, an ambulance had to come and take me to the hospital and my mind was going through some hallucinatory stages, very vivid imaginative stages, and I also started to read, to write, and to me, it was a surreal, almost drug like experience, having not enough oxygen, I could have become very stupid too, but in my case, it was very helpful. It wasn’t a nice experience, but if you look at writers and other creative people, many of them were sick as children and many had asthma in particular. Asthma is very psychological, it’s tied in with anxiety. My last attack was right before I started writing this book.

-So now you’re a full time writer : are you happy with that ?

-GS : Yes ! You know, when your first book does well, the pressure on the second novel is insane, and all my friends who succeed with their first book had horrifying second book experience. So I almost feel like it's a rite of passage, I’m working very hard to make sure that it’s better than the first, but it’s very hard. And also, when I worked for a living , it was also subversive to do this, all this typing, and it was good because it felt like I was fighting against my daily job ! Now that I have all this time, there’s nothing to fight against, and you become self indulging , so I’m trying still to get my stuff into the mind of somebody else, working everyday for five hours. It’s another life, but I like the idea of the fight ! Everything should be a struggle ! If not, life is so much less interesting ! There has been a lot of good fiction written in the last four years, since Bush came to power, movies also, but maybe repression is good for the creative spirit : look at what was produced in Soviet Union, and in Prague, etc, before the fall of the authoritarian system !

-To finish, what are your musical tastes ?

-GS : I love Hip hop, I think it’s the most interesting narratives that I’ve heard, there is really a kind of poetry. I grew up with Ice Cube, Los Angeles gangsta rap, very interesting stuff because it’s so political, about Jesse Jackson, gun violence. But, since then, it has become more and more about guns and bitches and all that stuff, and everything is getting dumb. But Ice Cube, Public Enemy were brilliant artists. Now, I enjoy some electronica, and Ghetto Tech, a bizarre team in Detroit, that only play in strip clubs : fast techno with kind of ghetto influence, the best one is DJ Assault. When I was younger, although I don’t speak French, I liked MC Solaar, but of course it was all lost on me ! And the Beatles, some Russian music nobody knows about and gangsta music.

-Do you listen to music when you work ?

-GS : Yes, but I try to listen to anything without lyrics, or it’s screwed up ! There’s one song called "Ass & titties", when they repeat "Ass & titties" for five minutes, that is good because it doesn't make any imprint, but when I hear lyrics, then I start to think about lyrics and that takes me away. But I listen to music all the time when I work and try to stay out of lyrics.

-And...Abba ?

-GS : Abba is a special love affair that nobody understands. I do like them, I grew up with them, and this song, ‘Money, money, money’, was our song when we came to America, we wanted money, in a rich men’s world ! Abba was our longing for the West. It’s not bad, I think it will survive, not just as kitsch, but it will survive as perfect pop songs, some of them are classics.

-So, your next book is under way ?

-GS : Yes, it will published in 2006, I hope. It’s finished except that it needs so much work. I wish I could write something very thin, but it's growing again and again ! I have so much to say, I can’t shut up ! And in books, I go on too much, too many diversions: it’s so American ! But I do love short novels, Hemingway or Fitzgerald did some very good ones : ‘The great Gatsby’ is to me the perfect novel, with the good elements of a short story and the good elements of a larger book and Philip Roth's ‘Portnoy’s complaint'.

Interview made in Paris in December 2004.

JP Coillard and Marie Lecocq.

Thanks to Marie Laure and Virginie from l’Olivier for their help.