Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist speaks at UCA campus

Novelist Jennifer Egan speaks to students and faculty members Wednesday at the University of Central Arkansas as part of her week on campus as an artist in residence.
Novelist Jennifer Egan speaks to students and faculty members Wednesday at the University of Central Arkansas as part of her week on campus as an artist in residence.

— When Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan visited the University of Central Arkansas last week, she referred to notes she had scribbled in a red and-black notebook.

She also scribbles - illegibly, she said - when she writes her novels and short stories with a pen on legal pads.

While Egan, 50, shuns computers when writing her manuscripts, she’s no stranger to technology or colorful characters.

The novel that won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2011, A Visit from the Goon Squad, for example, includes a chapter written in the format of PowerPoint presentations.

The novel - or as Egan called it, “this sort of raggedy rock ’n’ roll book” - features two main characters. There’s Bennie, a record executive and former punk rocker. And there’s his assistant, Sasha, who’s addicted to Xanax and stealing, whether the goods are a wallet, a scarf or a screwdriver.

If PowerPoint was unusual for a mainstream book,consider Egan’s short story “Black Box.”

In May 2012, The New Yorker magazine published the story, which first appeared in installments on Twitter.

Egan said in an interview last week that she doesn’t have any plans “at the moment” to write another Twitter story, although the limited-character format has its advantages.

“There’s a certain kind of unexpected poetry that can happen” in such short lines and makes them resonate, she said.

Egan even wrote her Tweets at first by hand, in a notebook with rectangular boxes on each page, according to an interview she gave The New Yorker last year.

A Tweet is a message that is posted to the online Twitter and that cannot exceed 140 characters.

Folks that don’t follow Twitter or buy The New Yorker may get to read that story, too.

One of two manuscripts Egan is now working on is “a kind of sibling book to Goon Squad” in that it borrows some characters from the novel, she said. “The Twitter story will hopefully be part of that [book].”

Egan isn’t sure yet if the planned novel will work out. “The question is, ‘Can I use the same technology with totally different results?’” she said.

For now, though, she’s pushing ahead, setting daily writing goals for herself - five pages on one manuscript and three pages on the other one.

But with two sons, ages 10 and 12, she said, she often fails to meet her goals. She wrote Goon Squad over three years - a relatively short time for her, Egan said.

Egan usually writes in her Brooklyn, N.Y., home, in her office or downstairs and in a chair “I can lean back in.” If she has writer’s block - or is “stuck,” as she put it - she sometimes goes somewhere else and does not leave until she makes progress.

Egan’s other books have included The Invisible Circus, Emerald City and Other Stories, The Keep and Look at Me.

Egan, who also writes for The New York Times Magazine, belongs to a writer’s group and doesn’t worry about editing when she writes her first draft.

“Plowing ahead,” she sometimes even changes the names of characters as she goes along - something she resolves when she reads back over her work later. For her, this approach works best.

“If I’m ruled by the old name, I won’t be open to the new name,” which may be the better option, she said.

Egan recalled that she decided she wanted to be a writer after finishing high school. She took a year off before going to college, worked and saved her money, bought a Eurorail pass and a backpack - she wore one at UCA last week, too - and began traveling.

Without the distractions of cell phones and the Internet in those days, Egan had plenty of time to be alone and think that year. And that’s when she decided to write rather than pursue an anthropology career as she had earlier planned.

She had a scholarship to study in England, where she recalled writing her first “atrocious novel.” When she wrapped up that first big literary attempt, she said, she had “a 600-page book that no one [could] read.”

Over several years, part of the time while working as a private secretary for the wife of a Spanish count, Egan drastically revised that once unreadable manuscript, originally titled Inland Souls. Ultimately, it became The Invisible Circus and in 1995 became her first published novel. It later was made into a movie starring Cameron Diaz.

As for Egan’s own reading habits, she said she tends to read books of the genre she’s working on at the time. While writing The Keep, for example, she said, “I really read almost nothing” other than Gothic thrillers during that time.

“Goon Squad is a direct reply to a book by Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time,” Egan said.

She, too, wanted to write about the time, but not as Proust did and in far fewer than the 4,000 pages-plus Proust’s work covered.

Lately, she said, she’s been re-reading Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, which she joked is having “a terrible effect.”

“I’m using the word ‘perhaps’ too much,” she said.

She’s planning to read Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm and recently read and “loved” Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep.

Egan’s favorite contemporary authors include Don DeLillo and Scott Turow.

Her all-time favorite writers are Edith Wharton and William Shakespeare. But as she said, “That [list] could go on and on. Why not Homer?”

Egan adores murder mysteries. “They’re like catnip. I can’t put them down,” she said.

As for her Pulitzer, she said it has affected her life: “It’s given me more readers. That’s the big change, and that’s really good.”

Arkansas, Pages 19 on 03/03/2013

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