LT: In Desperate Characters, when Sophie and Otto go for a drive, she sees a poster of an Alabamian presidential candidate. You wrote: “His country, warned the poster — vote for him — pathology calling tenderly to pathology.”
PF: That was based on George Wallace. (laughter)
LT: Your fourth novel, The Widow’s Children, like Desperate Characters, takes place in a weekend. It’s a very disturbed family romance. Laura, the mother, Clara, her daughter, her brothers, all have terrible relationships. The family is supposed to be celebrating. Laura keeps it a secret that her mother has just died. It’s an intriguing withholding on her part, and strategy on your part as author.
PF: A lot of things went into that. I don’t think in advance about psychology, because then I’d be a psychologist. I think there is an impulse in Laura to keep it private. She was possessive about her mother’s death and her mother, in a very primitive way. There are lots of reasons. She wanted to punish her daughter and her brothers. But that was also very primitive — to punish them for everything, for being themselves, for not paying attention to their mother, for neglecting her, for their laughter, for their lives. And then there was a child’s secrecy. That is very significant for me: a child’s secrecy and horror, because Laura was frightened by the death of her mother. If she didn’t say it, then it didn’t happen.
LT: Like magical—
PF: Magical thinking, exactly. Her main reason can fit under the subtitle “mischief,” of a certain psychological bullying, viciousness, revenge. There are other reasons, but they’re less significant.
LT: The Widow’s Children is structured in sections: Corridor, Drinks, Restaurant, specific places or times in which we expect things to happen or not to happen.
PF: The corridors of our lives are very different. We pass through them on our way to different places, but they also exist in themselves as places where things happen. In the restaurant, Laura looks around; Clara, all of them, are at the table, and they’re moored in middle-class-life comfort. It’s the hour of drink, persuasion, assuagement and satisfaction, but not at Laura’s table.
LT: The discomfort.
PF: It’s very extreme, and Carlos, Laura’s brother, can’t wait to get away, to escape. They all want to escape, except for Laura’s longtime friend Peter, who begins to sense, who sees how bad his choices were, but how inevitable.
LT: In the last paragraph of the novel, after Laura’s mother’s funeral, Peter remembers his childhood.
PF: I remember the last line. He had “known the cat and dog had been let out because he saw their paw marks braiding the snow, and felt that that day, he only wanted to be good.” That’s a kind of hope. We all wish we were good.
LT: Your characters all want to be good.
PF: Yes, I think that’s true. Except for Laura.
LT: Each of your books is quite different from the others, though there are recurrent themes, like justice, injustice, people trying to see their own flaws, wanting to be good, honest. The Widow’s Children stands out as something unto itself.
PF: It’s so dense and compact a book. But I think in the last novel I wrote, The God of Nightmares [set in New Orleans], I kind of eased up on pounding away at my themes. That’s really my most hopeful novel.
LT: Do you know why?
PF: No, except that it has a kind of easing.
LT: I think it’s that, in the text itself, there’s forgiveness.
PF: I think that’s true. Oh, yes.
LT: There’s the protagonist Helen’s mother’s letter to her. Her mother’s dying, and she asks Helen to forgive her. She also forgives Helen.
PF: She says you have to forgive me for myself. Because we’re all helpless, the way we are, until we can strike a judgment, a point — that’s why judgment comes in. I was just having a very complex thought. I don’t know how to speak about it.
LT: At the end, Helen discovers that Len, her husband, was in love with her best friend, Nina, years ago. She feels terribly betrayed.
PF: But after their fight, she passes her hands over his body while he’s asleep. Yes, it is forgiveness.
LT: Was your complex thought about forgiveness?
PF: We can’t forgive easily. We have to take into account what was done. Various people get treated so badly. People get mistreated all the time. Black people were treated as an entity in a terrible way. We’re such primitive creatures that we go by what we see, which is a different skin tone. Part of us is primitive.
LT: Helen leaves New Orleans, marries Len and the novel jumps into the future, when she thinks, “We were no more than motes of dust, drifting so briefly through a narrow ray of light that we could have no history.” All of your characters experience that.
PF: Yes, it’s a kind of profound life melancholy. But it’s offset by feelings of affection for other people and, in this case, particularly for people in the French Quarter, who took Helen in, so to speak. She had such a good time when they told their stories.
LT: The secondary characters are wild, vivid figures. It’s a war novel, like The Western Coast, but even more so. People go to war, come back, and don’t, which is felt in the entire city.
PF: Everything was made very precious by that sense of leave-taking. I just suddenly remembered the black man looking at the ship, and Helen and Nina saying, “What do you think he was thinking about?” Nina says, “Getting away.” I did see a black man looking at a ship, while living on the Mississippi. But I don’t know if he was longing to get away.
LT: Your fifth novel, A Servant’s Tale, begins with two words, “Ruina! Ruina!” It covers a lot of time and history. Luisa Sanchez is a character of great abjection. As a child, she comes to New York, America — El Norte — from San Pedro, where her mother was a maid, her father, the son of a plantation owner. When she grows up, Luisa decides to be a maid.
PF: You know what one of the reviewers said about that? A black woman in the New York Times wrote, “Why didn’t she pull herself together, go to college, and get a degree?” It’s like a corporate person rearranging a book of taxes, when they say it should go here in this column rather than here.