A conversation with Nicola Griffith about her novel Stay.

You've published several books and won a variety of awards in various categories of genre fiction. Stay is your first book with a "literary" publisher. Is the book or your writing different, or is just being regarded differently?

Here is an almost perfect example of that old saw: perspective is everything. Genre, in my opinion, is in the eye of the beholder. A book with a genre label is, to most readers, one that's misshapen. It's not easy to create a balanced novel: emphasis on one aspect usually comes at the expense of another.

I like to believe Stay is my best novel. (I like to believe that each novel is better than my last.) It is deeper, wider,and more dense. I am a better writer than the woman who wrote Ammonite, Slow River and The Blue Place. I have more tools in my writing box, and they are more sharply edged.

As I worked on Stay, I began to delight in seeing how many jobs I could get each metaphor (or description or character or event) to perform without any apparent overload. As a reader, I love to do a little work, love to have to figure things out to some extent myself; I loathe being spoon-fed. Creating something as dense as I wished it to be while leaving the space for the reader to do that work was a challenge.

The biggest challenge to the reader of any novel, though, is often the reviews. Previous reviews of my work have one thing in common: a determination to ponder whether or not the novel fits a genre. I've been accused of abandoning the genre, elevating the genre, transcending the genre, and looting the genre--and each reviewer has squabbled over just what genre I've been transcending, looting, or elevating. The Blue Place, billed as a "novel of suspense," was reviewed as a Mystery (but we knew whodunit, so what was the point?), a Novel (but then what were the guns and drugs doing in there, and why did people get killed?), and as Speculative Fiction (Aud is a super hero, so why does she have a hard time here and there?). My answer: why not? There is absolutely no reason that a novel set in a time or place we've never visited, or about the kind of people we don't normally meet, or concerning events that aren't commonplace can't attain beauty and balance and brilliance. A novel is fiction; it must be true, not realistic.

Stay clearly treads a line between literary and pulp. Is that a line you enjoy treading?

I scratched my head a bit at this question, then finally went to look up the definition of "pulp." According to the OED, it is "ephemeral literature, especially that regarded as being poor quality; popular or sensational writing generally." What strikes me as interesting about this definition is the puritan-like equation of inferiority with both "popular" and "sensational." There's an implied assumption that you can divide fiction into two neat piles, one labeled "Good quality, unpopular, unsensational" and the other "Bad quality, popular, sensational." When did provoking the senses become a bad thing? As Pauline Kael said, "If art isn't entertainment, then what is it? Punishment?" The notion of binarism in art is bizarre--about as meaningful as believing race can be split cleanly into black and white, sexuality into gay or straight, or behavior into right or wrong.

However, instead of going on a rant, I'll behave and say only that one of my aims (and joys) when I write is to unite traditions, conventions and styles usually seen as opposites: literary and genre, urban and pastoral, noir and confessional, hard-boiled and lyrical.

I don't like fiction that does only one thing, that spends its time, to quote Kael again, this time on Rain Man, "humping one note on a piano for two hours and eleven minutes." I don't like fiction that is mean-spirited. I don't like fiction that is safe. Many apparently risky novels are really manifestations of the writer desperately trying to hide herself. Often, if I read that a work is "daring" or a "tour-de-force" it turns out to be the creation of a frightened writer twiddling away with form or structure in order to avoid revealing anything of herself in the story. I like writers who don't hide and don't apologize.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Federico Garcia Lorca: "Senza duende, nada." Without passion (risk, heart, truth), nothing. That, for me, is the kernel of a good fiction. I would much rather read a book with the occasional clumsy sentence but a burning passion and an engaging story (plot is neither here nor there, but I'd prefer it didn't insult my intelligence) than a seamless, beautifully constructed novel with an empty heart. I don't think it makes sense to talk about fiction in terms of Real Life, but if I had to, then I'd say it should be larger than life, rather than smaller. I like fiction that gives me a variety of context: social, personal, historical, psychological, cultural, intellectual, emotional and so on. For that, it has to be able to change scale, switch focus from the interior to the exterior. I like books where Stuff Happens and Things Have Consequence on as many levels as possible. And then I want to be able to draw my own conclusions from the characters' insights. A novel doesn't have to have everything but it does have to have a certain balance, and it must have some joy, if only a drop. Joy is the point.

Aud takes the commercially-prized notion of a "strong female lead" to a new level. Are there any specific ideological or personal reasons for this? How do you expect readers to react?

Aud was born in a dream eleven years ago. In my dream, a woman sleeps naked on a carpet in her new, unfurnished apartment. It's a very hot night. She has nothing with her but the clothes she arrived in, and an old flashlight. She wakes to find a man pointing a gun at her. Without hesitation, without thinking about it, she unfolds from the floor and breaks his neck with the flashlight. The time from waking to killing him: less than two seconds. I woke up wondering what kind of person could do that. I came up with Aud.

I thought about her on and off for six years before I wrote a word. During that time and while I was writing, it never occurred to me that as a "strong woman" she might be commercially viable; I never thought of her a woman. Most of the time I don't go around thinking of myself as a woman; I don't think of myself as a man, either. I don't think about it at all, unless and until something happens to remind me ("Women aren't supposed to do that")--which frankly happens less and less. No doubt this is because our culture is changing but also because I'm no longer twenty-two, and because I'm no longer poor.

I don't have a clue how readers will react. The only thing I know for sure is that I'll be surprised.

Which leads to, do you write with an audience in mind? Not necessarily are you trying to write bestsellers, but do you write with a reader, or even a specific reader, in mind?

Myself, always. Who was it who said, If you're not having any fun how can you expect your reader to? I try to write what I desperately want to see on the shelves: stories of people in particular places, experiencing and learning from a variety of events and choices that are vividly described in terms that make sense on many levels. I write for people who approach novels as enjoyment for both the moment and the long-term, who might revisit the book every couple of years, talk about it with those they already love or want to get to know, and note how it and they have matured and changed. You appreciate different things about its texture or depth or subtlety.

The keynote to all this is, I suppose, change. I want to write fiction about characters who change, that has enough depth and structure to carry and support a reader's changing understanding. I'm not sure people who are set in their ways would be comfortable with my work.

What writers, contemporary or otherwise, do you particularly admire?

The writers whose work I admire most fiercely, the ones I'd like to invite to dinner, who helped me make me who I am--as a human being and a writer--are dead. Their work is, in some ways, outsider fiction; it is literary non-reality; it is filled with knowledge and love of the natural world; it ripples with joy and insight.

Maybe someone, somewhere, has done a study of how and at what age our reading tastes are formed, but my concerns as writer and reader had their beginnings in the wide-screen literature I absorbed before I was twelve: Iliad and Odyssey, the Norse sagas, Greek mythology, Catholic hagiography, fairytales and epics and legends.

The contemporary writers whose work does stay with me all have in common a touch of exoticism, of stranger-in-a-strange-land dissonance: Michael Ondaatje, Sherman Alexie (his short fiction), Sarah Waters (her picaresque), William Boyd (Brazzaville Beach and Blue Afternoon are lovely novels), Amy Bloom, Barbara Kingsolver (particularly her early work), A.S. Byatt (her later work, after she no longer felt constrained by reality), Jack Womack (Random Acts of Senseless Violence is heartbreaking), Jeannette Winterson (the prose in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is clean and clear and alive).

The finest writer I've found in the last twenty years, Patrick O'Brian, was inconsiderate enough to die just five years after I discovered his work. His twenty-volume Aubrey/Maturin series (in actuality one long novel) is one of the towering achievements of twentieth century literature. He was first recommended to me by the editor of an academic literary journal, who said: ignore the jacket blurb about Napoleonic naval warfare, just trust me. Right, I said. No, he said, really, I'm begging you: read the first two volumes. So I did, and was swept away. I came back delighted, increased, and stunned. Although the quality dims over the last five volumes, the first fifteen are faultless, brilliant in every sense of the word. I marvel at, to quote A.S. Byatt, his "prodigal specificity," at his erudition, his humane touch, his humor and subtlety, the perfect balance of exuberance and restraint, his unerring eye for the exact word, the comic detail, the ability to delineate changes in the friendship between two men with the same authority as volatile politics in South America or a brutal cutlass fight. Every reader who loves fiction intellectually and viscerally will find something to treasure in these books. Every writer will find something to envy.

The scenes of violence in Stay are both shocking and beautifully rendered, valuable to the book both emotionally and poetically. The only thing that seems like a valid comparison are the beautifully choreographed scenes of violence in Asian martial arts films--which are generally all male, and almost always directed and choreographed by men. Do you have any particular thoughts on the violence in your books, or its role in literature or art generally? What about in relation specifically to your work as a woman writer?

I'll have to come at this one from several different angles and just hope that the sum is greater than its parts.

I believe that violence is as much a part of natural human behavior as sex or excretion or hunger. We get heavily socialized about the proper expression of these behaviors--a few of us so heavily that we can no longer enjoy them at all. In Aud, I made a deliberate choice to bypass some of that socialization, to hit the narrative reset button on people and violence (the way I do with sexuality). When we first met Aud, she would use violence without feeling the need for explanation or guilt. She is the lightning strike, the hurricane; there is no malevolence behind her actions. She would hit and move on with no thought or understanding of the wreckage behind her. Her violence is neutral, a natural phenomenon; it isn't about inflicting pain, or asserting dominance. In this sense, she is an innocent.

Aud's understanding of the world is primarily physical. Her somatic experience is tempered by will and reason, and not--as is the case for so many in our culture, especially women--the other way around. She loves her body, and the understanding of its essential fragility makes life doubly precious. Every time she fights, she delights in the clarity and grace and expertise necessary for her survival; she revels in her heightened vitality; she celebrates the triumph of life. The language of the novel has to reflect this.

Loving and then losing Julia leads to Aud's emotional understanding of the effect of her violence on the people upon whom she unleashes it. In Stay, when she commits violence in the full knowledge of the hurt she is causing, she loses her particular innocence. To some extent, the novel is all about her reaction to her fall from grace, the acknowledgment that her world has changed irrevocably.

The catalyst for this change is grief. That's what grief does: it changes everything. We understand the world and our place in it differently. Grief throws that understanding at our feet like a gauntlet. If we accept the challenge, we are acknowledging that nothing ever stays the same, that we have changed, that we will keep changing. We are acknowledging that we will never reach a point where we understand everything because in a world of change there can be no absolutes. It is a heavy burden. In Stay, Aud has to choose whether or not to accept it.

Are we going to see more of Aud?

We'll see more of Aud. She has a lot to learn, so much to enjoy, and it's very satisfying to write about someone who lives so viscerally.

This interview appears in an abridged form in the Nan A. Talese 2002 Catalog & Rights Guide.

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