 I will introduce that greater length, our guests tonight. But beginning on my far right, Chitra Banerjee, Divakaruni, Alfred Veya, and Aprilson Clare. Just welcoming you all. And that A&E clip was a great tease, I thought. And I think it lives up to A&E, art and entertainment, actually. And I think that promises to be both in this show you all have done. What we just saw, and what comes on this Sunday night at 8 o'clock, right, is not the first version. It's not the first dramatization, as most of you know, of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In fact, there was a play made of The Great Gatsby. Shortly after the novel came out, the book was published in 1925. And the following winter, in February of 1926, a very successful playwright named Owen Davis adapted The Great Gatsby, and it played on Broadway and had a rather nice run with an actor named James Rennie. And playing Daisy was Florence Eldridge, if that name speaks to any of you. What was interesting is when the play was presented, it was rather done as a drawing room tragedy. Most of it took place in Gatsby's library. Shortly after that, based on the success of the play, a silent film was made of The Great Gatsby. It's almost never been shown. A few of us have seen it, though. And this, too, came out in 1926. And it's a rather interesting film, because that version of it is rather a cautionary tale. It starred Warner Baxter, whom most people don't even remember anymore, but he was a huge star in the 20s and 30s. Those of us who have some semblance of who Warner Baxter was really know him from 42nd Street. The movie, not the street. That is. And it actually featured a young actor as George Wilson, the gas station attendant, who is obviously very important in the plot of The Great Gatsby. It was a young William Powell. This, again, was a silent film. Then most people also don't realize there was a talking film version of The Great Gatsby made in the 1940s that starred Alan Ladd. And in this instance, Betty Field played Daisy Buchanan. And Myrtle Wilson, who was Tom Buchanan's mistress and the wife of the gas station attendant, was played by a much thinner Shelly Winters, I should add, also. What was interesting about the 1940s production of The Great Gatsby is it was very much a film noir. And they picked up on the whole mystery of the Gatsby story. And then most famous, I think, to all of you out here, and maybe you've seen it, maybe you didn't, was the 1970s version of The Great Gatsby starring Robert Redford and Mia Farah. And that version, of course, was very much like the 70s itself. It was really about the gloss and the wealth and the glamour and very much about the costumes. Frankly, I found that it took longer to watch than to read the book. What is interesting, and it'll be interesting to tune in to see what A&E has done, because this brief resume I've just given of the dramatizations of The Great Gatsby, I think really bespeaks one of the reasons it lingers with us so. This book is now 75 years old. And yet it just goes on and on and captures readers' attentions and producers and actors and screenwriters' attentions. And I think it's largely because, like the best literary works, it addresses different audiences in different times. And new themes keep surfacing every time this story is re-presented. Part of the reason for that, I think, is it is truly a multi-layered book. It has a very sound structure. And on its most basic level, I think it guarantees, it delivers unique and interesting characters and a truly unusual plot, all of which reveal time and place. When the reviews came out of The Great Gatsby in 1925, they were OK. Half of them thought the book was quite wonderful. Half thought it was rather ordinary book. But everybody did praise the structure of the book. And actually Fitzgerald credited his editor, Max Perkins, with structuring the book. I think that was, as Perkins felt also, that was slightly unfair. And I say this having gone through all of Fitzgerald's notes. And he, elaborately, like an architect, laid out this book and how it was to unfold. And it's written almost like a TV movie, in fact. It almost has station breaks. It falls into very neat chapters that almost go out. They fade to black, and then they come up again in another setting. He had a very theatrical, even cinematic sense, Scott Fitzgerald did. He always loved the movies himself. All this while revealing time and place, he really captures, I think, as no other American author so successfully does, the economic boom, and with that, the kind of immorality that was seeping into American society. It's a book that really captures the sexual license and, I think, licentiousness of the 1920s. And throughout patches of songs, he really captures the speech of the day, again, as no other writer, I think, for my money anyway, did. Interesting, one of the first titles Fitzgerald had while he was writing the first draft of what became the Great Caspian was a rather literal title called Among the Ash Heaps and the Millionaires. Not much of a title, really, but I think its starkness, its bareness, bespeaks these girders I've been talking about, that hold up this magnificent book, which leads to the second level, I think, that makes it so appealing today, now in 2001. And that is Fitzgerald's own very strong literary sense. It's all too easy to write Scott Fitzgerald off as just an alcoholic writer of the 1920s. The fact of the matter is, he took his writing extremely seriously. I tell you this, again, having gone through draft after draft of Fitzgerald's versions of the Great Gatsby. But also, what one tends to forget is he was extremely well read himself. You see touches of Henry James going throughout. I think it's not a coincidence that his heroine is named Daisy, rather like Henry James' Daisy Miller. You see great symbols running throughout. There are certainly light motifs of water and so forth that run throughout the book. But two of the most famous symbols in American literature are firmly planted in this one story. I'm talking, of course, about the green light at the end of Daisy's doc, which hundreds of people have written senior theses about, and the all-seeing eyes of Dr. T. J. Ecclberg, the Oculus who has a big billboard over the garage of the Wilson garage. What is interesting, and again, I got this going through Fitzgerald's papers, if any of you has this version, or if you ever see it, the paperback version, they've reproduced the original jacket of the Great Gatsby on it, which is this rather interesting drawing. What was interesting is, or this painting, actually, Max Perkins, as Fitzgerald's editor, had this jacket commissioned while Fitzgerald was still finishing the book, and he sent a copy of it to Fitzgerald, saying, is this sort of what your book is about? And Fitzgerald said, hold on to that jacket. Don't do anything. I must have it. Because looming over this New York scene are these two great eyes of a woman. It's meant to be a lady loved, Daisy, perhaps. But Fitzgerald was so inspired by that, he said, I can do something with that. And it was largely from this drawing that Fitzgerald then began to plant the idea of these two godlike eyes looking down on the whole scene, on the whole story that then unfolds. So it was truly one of those happy accidents. Fitzgerald, at this point, was thinking about calling this book Trimalchio at West A. West A, of course, was one of the settings of the book. A few of us realized today, Trimalchio was a character in Petronius Arbiter's Satiracon, written, really, at the beginning of time. I mean, literally, it was written about the year 60, AD, by Petronius. And Trimalchio was a figure in that book who threw these very lavish parties, who lived all too ostentatiously. And Fitzgerald, again, who was rather well read in the classics, knew the story of the Satiracon and knew this character of Trimalchio. Max Perkins said, I'm not sure everyone's heard of that, Scott. You might want to move on to something else. And I think this leads us, or at least this momentary discussion, into the next great selling point of the great Gatsby, for me, perhaps the most important. And it's, to me, what hooked me on F. Scott Fitzgerald when I was 15 years old, when my mother, well, two things. She informed me that I had been named for Scott Fitzgerald because she was reading Fitzgerald in her ninth month of pregnancy with me. But second, it was the moment she said to me, Scott, I think you ought to turn off the television set and start reading. And this was the first book that was put into my hot little hands. It was the great Gatsby. And from the opening, very lyrical passages to the closing, which for me is one of the most beautiful lines in all of literature, so we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past, wow, a writer could do that out of nothing. I mean, it had, quote, nothing to do with plot or character, it's just, he just pulled this stuff out of the ether. And I thought this was the most exquisite stuff I had ever read in my life. Well, I had never read anything, so what did I know? But I think also on the idea of Fitzgerald as a kind of poet, it's not just the quality and the nature of his language. I think that poetry is largely about concision. It's about compressing as much as you can into the smallest compass. And I cannot think of a better example of that than the great Gatsby, which is so laden with rich characters and this rather complex plot. And yet in 50,000 words, it's all packed into that. It's crystallized, it's like this diamond that has just been crystallized, crystallized, crystallized. And it's also around this time that Fitzgerald began to think of a more poetic title for his book. He was gonna call it the High Bouncing Lover. And he got that title because he had, well, there was a poem that went like this that he uses as the epigraph for the book. Then wear the gold hat if that will move her. If you can bounce high, bounce for her too. Till she cry, lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you. Now, the epigraph then tells you that that was written by a poet named Thomas Park-Dinvilliers. Well, I dare say none of you has ever read Thomas Park-Dinvilliers because he doesn't exist, except in one book, This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald's first book, he had a character named Thomas Park-Dinvilliers, who was a poet. And here Fitzgerald was passing off one of his great works, one of Dinvilliers' great works. So there you have it. Then he entered another phase, which is quite interesting. After he had been working on this book for a few years, Fitzgerald very consciously, I think, became aware that he was writing the Great American Novel. He wanted to write it, and that's not just a modern phrase, that's a phrase he threw around back in the 20s. He very self-consciously told friends that he was writing the Great American Novel. He was trying to think of how his book could encompass big American themes and prototypes. And these include self-invention, the self-invented Gatsby, a man held bent and indeed held bound on jumping classes, a very American theme. It's a book largely about the work ethic, about cheating the system, about unattainable love, about beauty. And just before the book was published, Fitzgerald took a trip with his wife, Zelda. They went to Europe. And literally, the book is about to come out. It's three weeks away from coming out, and he sends a telegram to Max Perkins, saying, is it too late to change the title? Yes. But the title he wanted to change it to was Under the Red, White, and Blue. Now, I think that really tells you something so big about this book and about Fitzgerald that he really did see this as a great American panorama. And somehow all those things come together as the Great Gatsby. And as Fitzgerald is writing all these letters and drafts and so forth, he's corresponding all the time with Max Perkins, who keeps saying, what about that title, The Great Gatsby? You know, you kept talking about that. I think could be the one. And Fitzgerald finally did go with The Great Gatsby, and he did admit that he felt it was the book's one big flaw. He never cared for the title, and he said, he thought there was nothing really great about Gatsby. And in that moment, I thought, oh, even Fitzgerald was so close to his work, he couldn't even see the irony, his own irony that he had created so brilliantly about Gatsby. But there's much more about this book and this career. And again, here we are, talking about a man who died in 1940. Why this book lasts and why Fitzgerald still haunts us, especially this book did not succeed when it came out. It sold about 20,000 copies. That's considered pretty good. Fitzgerald's first two books, though, sold well beyond that, 60,000, 75,000 copies. This was a real come down for him. And I think there are all sorts of reasons for it. One is, I think this was a much more serious work than he had written or than his readership expected of him. But I think the reason this endures has to do with the fact that perhaps more than any other American author, and I'm even including Hemingway here, we cannot shake Fitzgerald the man with Fitzgerald the work. We can't quite separate them. And I think we as readers, we as an audience, are as obsessed with the life of Scott Fitzgerald and the fabulous crazy Zelda and the high living of the 1920s. We are as obsessed with that as with his work. And I'm constantly reminded, when I read Fitzgerald, especially this book of something Thomas Wolf once said, which is, all serious work in fiction is autobiographical. And I think that is so true with Fitzgerald. Here was a man who was actually from the middle class, an Irish-American family that was teetering into the upper middle class. But they never really quite made it. A father who failed in business, a mother who had a small inheritance, Midwestern family with some southern roots, but constantly lured by the east, by New York City. We have a man who became a soldier, Scott Fitzgerald. While he was a soldier, how much like Gatsby is this, he met a southern bell named Zelda Sayre. While he was stationed in Montgomery, Alabama, this was in 1918. They courted, they got engaged. Zelda broke off the engagement because she saw no future for this guy. And it wasn't until he quit his job in the advertising business, wrote his first novel, This Side of Paradise. And it was published that she finally agreed to marry him. And indeed, it was one week after the book was published to huge acclaim that she said, I will and I do. And she did. And in 1920, This Side of Paradise was published. That led to the beautiful and damned, many short stories, which then led to the great Gatsby. During this time, all sorts of themes were bubbling up within Fitzgerald. A lot of Catholic guilt going on at this time, too. But the themes of self-invention, the pursuit of the American dream, how does class play a role in American society? Lust and romantic love, how does that fit into a puritanical world? A volatile bell, Zelda, very much like Daisy Buchanan, this need for security. And all of this is told under the haze of prohibition alcohol, energized by that post-war generation, what Gertrude Stein called the lost generation, flappers, the sexually adventurous, a mobile society. And I mean literally, transportation-wise and economically, with no limits. And all this in this remarkable 50,000-word book, which now sells hundreds of thousands of copies a year. It's sold well into the tens of millions of copies around the world, since it was first published in so many languages. As the 20th century was ending, there were all sorts of polls on the favorite books, the greatest books. The Great Gatsby was the number one American book at the top of every list I saw. And usually every international book surpassed only by Ulysses. All this by a 28-year-old writer who died virtually penniless, and his books were drifting out of print. And that perhaps leads to the greatest legacy of all, which is why we are all here tonight. Because that legacy, I think, somehow filters down to my friends here to my right. Because even among tonight's diverse writers, despite the different cultural backgrounds that make up this country, that make up this table, I somehow feel the presence of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Our speakers tonight, April Sinclair, was born and grew up in Chicago during the times of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. She has lived in Chicago and Florida and presently resides in Oakland, California. Her first major success came with the release of her national bestseller. Coffee Will Make You Black, which was in 1994. The book is set on Chicago's south side in the mid-to-late 1960s, and is the story of a young black woman called Stevie. Sinclair's next major work came in 1995. It was a sequel. It was called Ain't Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice. She also has a new novel. I left my back door open. Alfredo Vea was born in Arizona and worked as a migrant farm worker as a child and a young man. He served in Vietnam, and after his discharge, worked through a series of jobs, ranging from truck driver to carnival mechanic, as he put himself through law school. He is now a practicing criminal defense attorney. He is also the author of two previous novels, La Maderilla and the Silver Cloud Cafe. And Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni was born in Calcutta, and spent the first 19 years of her life in India. She moved to the United States to continue her studies, getting a master's degree from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, both in English. For several years, she has been interested in issues involving women, and she has worked with Afghani women refugees and women from dysfunctional families, as well as shelters for battered women. Her book of short stories, Arranged Marriage, which has won critical acclaim and the 1996 American Book Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers and Penn Oakland Awards for Fiction. She has also published two novels, The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart. For 20 years, Chitra has lived in the Bay Area and taught at Foothill College. In 1997, she moved to Texas with her husband and two children, where she taught creative writing at the University of Houston, and she has now retired, I'm told, to Fremont, California. Please welcome, once again, our guest. And now, I would like to talk as little as possible and hear from them, and I think I would like to begin by asking, generally and specifically, whether Scott Fitzgerald and the great Gatsby, for that matter, has had any conscious or perhaps subconscious influence on each of you as a writer, either when you were breaking in or to this day, how do you feel about it? People, why don't we begin with you? A slight correction. Yes. I live in Berkeley. Oh, what did I say? Nothing against Oakland. I've lived in Oakland for a long time. That's what I get. 13 years or things. Get for not getting a second score. 13 or 15, I live in Berkeley. I've never lived in that state of Florida, I have to say. In case I'm ever in court or something, I've watched court TV. You have to correct these things. I'm glad you did. Just because it's being filmed on the record here. No, my parents live in Florida. They do? But you visit them, right? And you love them. And when you're there, it's like being at home. Well, I've been in the state, yes. I plan to go to school. Well, don't blame me. I just read this stuff. I don't write it. You're so eloquent. I hesitate to even make this correction. I'm glad you did. But I'm not sure I love to be corrected. I know where it'll come up again. It could haunt me or something. So your question again was how does that sound? Fitzgerald, if there was any influence as you began as a writer or even today, how do you feel about it? Well, maybe unconsciously. Consciously, no. I read The Great Gatsby in high school. And at the time, I don't think I felt I could relate to it at all hardly. I was growing up on the south side of Chicago. And I just thought it was a book about rich, idle white people. And I just couldn't. I mean, I guess I wasn't that into it. It just wasn't happening. This was in high school in the late 60s and early 70s. And hey, I couldn't relate to any F. Scott Fitzgerald. I'll be honest with you. Now, upon rereading it, I'm really appreciating it. I can see it's a masterpiece. And I can relate to the universality of the book. But at the time, I couldn't. I really probably just kind of skimmed through it. Because I'm like saying, wow, wow. But it just goes to show you how much your perspective can change as you grow and mature and all of that. Yes. Alfredo, has this book been in your life? Well, I live in Oakland, by the way. Not Florida. And I have a third novel called Guys Go Begging. It's in the bookstores now. I want you to think. Good. But it has in sort of a reverse way. I remember reading it in high school. And I remember appreciating and identifying with the fact that Gatsby was an outsider. And I certainly felt like an outsider. I went to high school that was all white. All the kids went to radiation laboratory. Their fathers were all physicists. And I was a farm worker. And I felt very outside. So I liked that part of Gatsby. And I liked Kamu, his character. And I loved Melville. And it took me a while to realize what was happening here. Why did I like these people? That's because Melville was writing as an outsider, not telling anybody he was gay. He had not even his wife and three kids. And writing about the leviathan that's being hunted by America, this sort of this pureness of natural man and natural America being hunted down by another leviathan, the American industry that's willing to do almost anything. You have its way and probably will for the next four years. And Gatsby, sort of an inverse. Because it was like looking at a print, a photographic print, and feeling that I myself was one of the negatives. And I wanted to see the negatives. This was the jazz age. And something was happening just 30 miles away from West Egg that isn't even mentioned in the book. And that was the Harlem Renaissance, probably one of the most important events in the history of this country. It's the place where jazz was legitimized, where it became the classical music of America, where it created the language that we speak even now. In fact, it just focused the language that we speak now. I just have a short list. I'll read a little bit of some of the language from the Harlem Renaissance, like buckaroo. That's an ebibial word. Western Africa, it was first noted for its use in America in 1774. Rap, the verb to speak together, is from Sierra Leone. And its first use was in 1778. Cuckoo for crazy. It's a Bantu word, first use 18th century. OK is a Mandinko word from the word OK, first use 1775. Jive is a Wolof word, meaning to disparage. Its first use was early 1800s. Jiffy is a Bantu word, meaning to do things quickly. Jazz is from Jassy, a Bantu word, first used, first noticed in this country in 1777, meaning to make it dance. To jam is a Mandinko word, which means to play together. First noticed and written down before 1800. Honky is a Wolof word, meaning from the word honk, meaning pink. And to bug is a Mandinko word, meaning to annoy. Bozo, a Bantu word, meaning a stupid person. To dig is a Wolof word, meaning to understand. First noted in 1801. Goose is a Wolof word for anus, to goose somebody. And lamb is an Igbo word, meaning to escape. First noticed in the late 1700s. The Jazz Age began long, long before it began. But it was focused on the Harlem Renaissance in 10 years in a very frail place that could not survive the depression. And for me, knowing that that was happening and finding it absent in Gatsby was bothersome. And I think that's the answer to my question why my ethnicity, ethnicity in general influences my writing. I'm not going to ever argue that Gatsby needs to write about the Harlem Renaissance. I think his only job is great art, which he did. I think that it falls to others to write about the Harlem Renaissance. And some people like me, like April and Chitra, feel an obligation from the day they're born and the first time they ever look in a mirror. And Chitra, I suppose you were born in Ft. Lauderdale. No, no. And actually, I quite like that part about retiring in Fremont, although I'm not sure that's what I'm doing. That's what they say. It's hard to imagine you retiring. That is, I think, well, it's hard for me to imagine any writer ever retiring because there's always another page to write. But tell me what effects influences Fitzgerald or Gatsby specifically might have had in your early writing career or today, or how you might proceed in the future? Well, I came to the great Gatsby actually in graduate school when I started studying American literature. I had not studied American literature before. So that was when I was exposed to it, and I liked it. I remembered it. I thought about it a lot. But it didn't speak to me the way the writings of some other people that I also came across in college did, people like Maxine Hong Kingston writing The Woman Warrior, that that book spoke to me at just a different gut level. And when I read that book, I said, that's the kind of book I want to write. That's the kind of book I need to write. The story of my people, the stories that have not been told. And I think that is the way in which my ethnicity was important to my writing. I think, though, what many writers, I think almost every writer has in common with Fitzgerald, is that we are all writing about our culture. And we cannot escape our culture. Some of us write directly about it. Some of us write in response to it. We might be writing a historical novel. But our interest in the history of that period is really influenced by what we think of our culture. And even the periods we choose may have something very central to do with what we feel about our culture. When we're writing fantasy, the works of Ursula Le Guin, for example, are deeply informed by her attitude to her culture. Sometimes we write about cultures that we are personally in touch with. I'm thinking of V.S. Nipal writing A Bend in the River. Sometimes we write about cultures that we have thought about and have a tangential relationship to. Again, V.S. Nipal writing about an area of darkness about India when he hadn't really been in India that long. It's based on travels in India. So it's an outsider's view. And I think writers who are approaching culture in that way have had a really strong influence on me in my writing. In the ways in which I try to tell the immigrant stories or I try to look at people who are moving from India to the United States and back again, which is what's happening in a lot of my work. And even historically, I'm thinking almost every or is it true that almost every American story is, to some degree, an immigrant story. And to some degree, unless you're somebody like Louis Awkencloss, who was to the manner born or an Edith Wharton, one of those few who was on the inside. I mean, 99% of our people and writers are they not writing the outsider's experience? Is that not largely what Fitzgerald really was the boy with his nose pressed against the glass? I think he is largely seen as Nick Carraway in the great Gatsby. He is not one of the beautiful and rich people. As indeed, Gatsby himself is not. He's somebody who has made all this up. How does this fuel your own writing? Was it just the absence of books that told your stories that really propelled you into writing your various stories? Talk about your work. Well, in my case, and first, I want to just agree with everything I've heard and to also say that I think what you're saying, I mean, you were very good at expressing what you were saying. But I guess what I want to say is that you can be an outsider. I think we're all outsiders. I think anybody who writes as an outsider, to some degree, that's the nature of writing, is to have one foot in and one foot out. Or you wouldn't know what it was worth writing about. You have to be an observer of your own culture as well as being a part of the culture so that you can communicate, express it. But I felt like an outsider reading the great Gatsby, even rereading it. I can appreciate it. And I admire it, the writing. And I can relate to it because there are universal themes. And it's just very well-written. And it is a masterpiece. And yet, I'm African-American. And I'm reading lines like the three people in the car. And I don't have it exact. Two bucks and a girl. And I'm like, two bucks? I mean, could you see writing that now? He's reflected in the 20s. But I mean, this is the narrator. This is Nick's voice. It's not like a character. And so of course, I feel differently than someone reading the book, perhaps, from that era, or a different culture, different race, whatever. So I even felt like an outsider reading it. And I was moved to write because I was able. I was lucky enough to be able to read writings of African-Americans and people of color coming of age in the 60s and 70s like I did. But I also loved the catcher and the rye and to kill a mockingbird. Are there viewing a pickup on this? Yeah, well, I specifically pegged into your own work. Well, I've always disliked that the people, when they feel all inclusive and happy, like this Ken Bird's thing with jazz that we're watching now, that's very nice. But I really don't like that model. Because there is a basic assumption that there is an American culture and that the dusky ones are like doxons sort of yapping around the skirts of American culture. And we've embraced that model for a long time. And it's really the opposite. It has been for a long time. These people coming across the oceans and across the borders are the American culture. They have been and always will be. There is nothing that I can say in this language that isn't a mixture of Scotch, Irish, and African. And there's no music that we can hear that isn't a mixture of Irish, African, and German from the East Coast. And so I think I write to try to overturn that model. And that was my primary purpose in my first book. And it became, now it's sort of embedded, even though I've learned more about writing since then. In my fourth book, it'll be there somewhere in the shadows. That same purpose to reverse that skewed model that we have of ourselves. I'm tired of people viewing minorities as assailing the American canon one at a time. I mean, they are the American canon. And I want that to be heard. I want that to be said. And I want people in my novels to look like me and you and the rest of us. And Chitra, for you who was born out of this country, do you feel that has altered your perspective now? Yes, very much. I think I came to writing in a more tentative and personal way. When I started writing, it was really very much for myself. And the first impulse that led me to writing was this was several years after I moved here and I finished graduate school and I was teaching. And my grandfather died. And this was a grandfather I was very close to and he was in India. And I had not seen him for a number of years. And he died and I was terribly upset by the event, particularly because I hadn't gone back to see him for a number of years. And then, you know, I wanted to remember him and I was thinking back and I began to feel that I had already forgotten a great deal about him. And I couldn't even call up his face in my memory. I couldn't remember some of the things he used to say to me. And so I started writing as a way of a step against forgetting. And I started writing about the things of my childhood. And I think in that way, India, particularly India, I remembered as a young child, became very important in my work and became very much a part of my writing. My background is interesting in that, although I grew up in Calcutta, which is a major urban center, I was always very connected to the rural areas. I come from a village, which is my ancestral village, where about five generations of our family have lived. And every vacation I went back to that village. So in stories in arranged marriage, particularly, the village figures as a very important part. And it has its own culture. It's very different from the culture of Calcutta and certainly very different from the culture of the Bay Area. And it's the juxtaposition of these cultures as characters move from one place to the other that has been very important for me to explore in my stories. And the second thing that obviously had an enormous influence on my writing was the very act of immigration, because it changed me in ways that I can't even articulate. It made me aware of a whole different world. It made me see my old world in a whole different way. And I wanted to write about it. I wanted to write about how immigration changes our relationships with just about everyone we know and ultimately with ourselves. And I think that's a big theme in all of my books in arranged marriage, as well as the Mistress of Spices in a kind of mythic way and then in Sister of My Heart. Did you want to pick up on that offer? I wanted to ask, I mentioned that Fitzgerald very consciously spoke of writing the great American novel. Does this ever run through your heads, either on the grand scale or even just in a small G and a small A and a small? And do you think of yourselves as, first of all, American novelists? Is that an important appellation for you? And do you think that what you are writing is part of the big canvas or is the big canvas the way Fitzgerald, even in this rather slender volume, rather self-consciously thought he was doing? Any of you? Or is this just a bogus concept? Well, I took a lot of heart in fact that he died almost unknown. I'm not going to be penniless, but I'm working on not being unknown. But I'm not sure that that question is askable now in the present. Because I'm frustrated because so many publishing houses closed down and so many merged, so many editors lost their jobs, so many fewer literary fiction novels are being written and fewer are being accepted. And people who write a first novel and don't sell five or 10,000 the first time dropping, falling off the tree. So I don't know that this is the time for someone to write that novel. I'm not sure people would recognize it. Well, I mean, for example, I recently heard of a novelist who submitted his manuscript and whose editor said, this is too European. It needs to be more American. He's talking about my last novel. We just heard the story in the green room. But how do you respond to that? Is it the same answer that there may be no such thing as that now? I hate to give you this answer. I mean, it's really tough because what they're telling you is the bottom line. We're not sure Americans would pick this up with your name on it. My agent even said it from Berto Echo wrote it. People would accept this. But we don't know that an American writer would be accepted writing this kind of thing. It is frustrating. And I don't know that I want to compromise on the other hand. And I don't want to die penniless like F. Scott Fitzgerald. So I have to come to a decision on this one. Yes, of a heart attack at 44, I was really an alcoholic. I was just going to say that an agent, I'm going to say my agent that way you can't trace it. An agent, I know, said there's no such thing as a big book anymore. There's no great American novel anymore. And I think there may be some truth to that. And like you said, if there was, they might not recognize it. Because it's such a market. The marketplace has changed. I mean, there's so many more books published, and yet the bottom line is so much more important. I mean, I don't think the publishing houses are able to publish books that they want to publish as much anymore. I know I taught a workshop and worked with a writer who I thought had written a really wonderful book. And I went to Taos. And she was in New Mexico. And she was half Indian, or half Native American, whichever there they say Indian. And half white, Caucasian, European, you got it. OK, and so she submitted the book. And they said, it's a wonderful book at one time. And like 10 years ago, they go, 10 years ago, we could have really published it. But there's no room for just a sweet. It's too small a book. Even though there's not room for a big book, there's, in a way, the small books are not acceptable either. Does it make sense? I mean, it sounds strange. It doesn't make sense to you. What I'm trying, it doesn't make sense, but that's the way it is, is what I'm saying. You can't, there are no really big books anymore, from a literary standpoint, that can really make it necessarily. But if you have a small literary gem, it's not publishable necessarily, because it won't make enough money. Does that make more sense? It's a money thing, you got it now. I had to put it, I had to come down, it's a money thing. You know, the demographics have changed. It used to be it was Boston, Seattle, New York, San Francisco, red. And now it's places like Dallas, Texas. And you can imagine what they're reading. It isn't literary fiction, I'll tell you right now. When that changes, everybody gets heard who wants to write a novel. One of my friends, John Straley, who's a novelist, lives in Alaska. He said, if you left a book of poetry on a park bench, no one would ever steal it. And that's where we are now, unfortunately. And we also know that the American business machine, if you will, could sell anything. And they did. They did with Bridges of Madison County. They do it with Scott Thoreau. They can pump anything into the American vein that they really want to. But they perceive that new is better, which is why classical music has died away in our country. Jazz, literary illusion has died away. And that isn't true. Hopefully something like this movie about Gatsby will spur people to realize that great things have been around a long time. Well, I think, Alfredo, you're being too pessimistic. And I think something like the great American novel, if we were to put a title on a book, I think one needs the perspective of time to be able to do it. Sometimes I think we're just very close to what's being written. And we can say, yes, I like this very much. And yes, this is why I like it. And these are the significant themes in it that I relate to and that resonate for many people. And that seemed to transcend time. But really, we have to wait and see. I mean, Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby. Most people didn't think that was the great American novel. So I think as a writer, all I'm concerned with is just writing the best novel I can and being as true to my subject and things that concern me and that I'm passionate about. That's the only thing I have control over. I don't have control of the marketplace and I really don't think that's my job. My job is to write and to be very close to my work and very true to it. I think you have to set your life up in such a way that you can prioritize. I mean, I think if the work is the most important and for all of us, I imagine it is, you have to be able to create that work and you have to set your life up in such a way that you can make it happen. And for me, it's the work. And I realize that, you know, I may never have as big a book as coffee will make you black and I would like to, but the focus has to be for me, the work. You know, I just have to do my best work and whatever happens, happens. But I can't try to make, you know, keep, you know, outdo myself or write the blockbuster or look for the formula. I just have decided that, you know, whatever, I try not to have too many high tastes or too many luxuries so that the focus can be just doing the best work you can do and let the chips fall where they may. Well, I just want to say that I'm not sure I'm being that pessimistic. Irrealistic? Only because, only because I, everywhere I go when I read, I always find this core in Madison, Wisconsin or San Antonio, Texas of smart people, you know, who love to read, who love to talk about reading and writing and they keep me alive, these people. But you know, it's not a large number in our country. We've become anti-intellectual. I'm not gonna give you examples, but I could. But you know, I mean, like Herman Melville, I mean, I still love Herman Melville. I mean, if my chest were a cannon, I would fire my heart at thee. If I wrote that today, or if Herman Melville, brand new, tried to get that published today, Moby Dick, they'd throw him out on his ear. Dostoevsky, you know, notes from underground, what the hell's wrong with you? You know, nothing happens here, you know? And I know that that's true, and I think you know that too. And that's a problem, because I mean, you need freedom to create your art and it takes a long time to earn it, I think. And then that's, you know, that's what Penguin is telling me, you know, really. They're saying, you know, compromise a little bit more and maybe, you know, on your sixth book you'll cut you loose, you know. That's what happened with Russell Banks. I mean, they allowed him to write Clouds, Cloud Splitter, because of the three novels that came before in the movies. That was the name of that, Affliction, Affliction. And hell, he did, we went camping with the guy. All he did was complain about the fact that his publishing house wouldn't let him write Cloud Splitter, because they said, nobody's gonna read it, it's 800 pages. Who the hell's gonna read the 800 pages? You know, they just bitched at the guy and he just wanted to write the best novel that he could write. And now, I mean, that thing got remainder in like five weeks and he has to start over with his company, except he's got so much mule on it, I didn't care. But I'm not in that position. I'm stopping talking now. No, but this raises, I mean, to get personal with all of you. Okay, it's good. Let me just, I'm getting over the flu everywhere. I'm not as glib as I might be otherwise. He's articulate, but go on. But if what happens when an editor whom you have worked with, trust, like, says, if you would just do this and make the compromises you were saying, and it would not only ensure publication, but I think it would widen your readership that instead of reaching 5,000 people, you might reach 100,000 people. Why not do that? Or would you do that? It depends on why the change was being suggested. If the only reason was that more people would buy the book, I would not. But if there were a structural reason, if it would improve, let's say, a character, if it would make something come out better, if it would make it a better novel, I would do it. And if it were an editor I trusted, I wouldn't mind changing. But it's very important to me to understand why this change is being suggested. Is it for the good of the work, or is it for the good of the publishing house? Well, I think it raises the question of audience. Who are you writing for? And for me, I feel torn, because one of the reasons I wanted to be a writer was because I wanted to reflect my experience, express my experience, write about my background. I grew up on the south side of Chicago, and I wanted to write about what that was like for me. And I wanted people to read my writing that could relate to that, or who had shared that experience, as well as people from different backgrounds or who had maybe vastly different experiences. And so for me, I feel torn. Like, I would like, I guess on some level, just like anyone else to write the great American novel. But then, at the same time, I also want to write books that people want to read that may not necessarily pick up the great American novel. Like, I speak sometimes in, you know, like in drug rehab, or go to the prison, or, I mean, I have a large readership that's not that literate, so to speak. And so I'm really touched sometimes that someone says, every time I be incarcerated, I read one of your books. And you know, this is part of my audience, and like, you know, when I go in here, every time they just be reading your books in the jails, and I'm like, what is, you know, and so, and so it's kind of, you know, touchy. Not just as like, touchy, touchy, but you know, it's real. And so I'm torn sometimes, because I want to write books that people like in rehab or in jail, and risk young people want to read. And as well, I also want to be literary. So that's my, that's my dilemma now. So I just think of the interest in, you know, talking about the anti-intellectualism, but hey, what about that dilemma? Yeah, you know, that is so true, because I think I'm often torn in the same way, and when I write, I think about my mother, and my mother reads English very fluently, but she's a particular kind of reader, and I want her to be able to read my books, and I want her to be able to enjoy my books. And I feel very moved when, you know, old Indian ladies or old women from different cultures will come and say, well, this is one of the few English books I read, and I really liked it. And I think that's very important, but you know, I refuse to say that you can't do both. I will not accept it. That is the challenge I want to take on. I think you can write books that are deep and literary and accessible, and that's the challenge I want to set myself. That's the challenge. Well, I'm heartened by all this. No, thank God, we melted that cynical heart of yours. No, no, I think that's always been the case. I mean, I argue with Rosemary and my editor, because she wants, she always wants tags put in there so everybody can keep along with a plot line. And still, if I go off on these crazy flights of the cabala, the book about farm workers, there's a reason for it, and hopefully there's enough that it'll keep an average reader there and enough to pull people up from being an average reader. Alice Walker, who I never quote, said that once said that there are three books, the one you want to read, the one you want other people to read, and then the one you want to write. And the last one's a luxury. So it is a real dance. True enough. I'd like to take the next few minutes if any of you has a question for any of the panelists. This would be a good moment, because we have just a few minutes before they boot us out of this wonderful auditorium. Way in the back. Wait for the microphone. And yes, the mic must come to you, because you're being preserved for all time. I just, I'm a community college English teacher. And I have to say that most of us use most of your books because all of you are writing in a lot of the ways that Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby. People can read The Great Gatsby, and Fitzgerald opens up a world to us that we enter. We enter those worlds in your books, and those worlds are very valuable for the people who are one of them. We read to get outside of ourselves. And I think that's what most people learn as they read, is that you can't, you're trapped in your own body. The only way you can get outside of your body is to read other people's experiences, and all the books that I've used to viewers give us that opportunity. So I don't think that we're all limited to read one book. And I presume you have a lot of students who are not imprisoned. Some have been. Some have been. Yeah, go there. But some are in the outside. And yeah, and many are first, second language students, and many are older people returning to school. And I think what we need to do is, you know, there's such garbage on TV and stuff, it's just such a pleasure to open a book and connect with the characters, and travel with the narrator, and get outside of the world we live in. And that's what we give people when we offer them that option. So thanks. What a wonderful thing to say. Any other questions? Questions, questions? Yes, sir. The mic is coming to you. Roll the question around in your mind. Make it even more articulate than you thought it would be. What is the role of money in The Great Gatsby, and then what is the role of money in the fiction that all of you write? Is money a central theme in most fiction? I think about it. I'm aware of money. I say that because there is one description of a voice in The Great Gatsby in which the narrator says she had the voice. There was a form of money in the voice. Money is a huge theme in the book, obviously, as it was in Fitzgerald's life, but maybe what April was just suggesting, I think money is on every writer's mind. I'll tell them my little joke. It's not a joke. Well, I was, you know, Anne Lamont. Okay, you know, Sam, her son, you know of him. Okay, so Anne Lamont was talking about a few people. She was just saying this person. They're situations or problems or whatever. And Sam Lamont, Sam said, it doesn't sound like anybody's happy. And I said, I think I'm pretty happy. And he said, no, oh, he says, nobody seems like nobody's happy. And I said, I think I'm pretty happy. He said, nobody who has any money. She was mentioning some people with, you know, they were rich, I have to say. What else? I remember when I first got interested in Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby specifically, I remember somebody made a comment. Oh, you know, he's such a superficial writer. He really just writes about money. And I thought, well, A, that isn't true, but B, that becomes just a metaphor for so much more because it's about what we, it's the apotheosis of money, what we make it. But also it's about the corruption that comes with the money. And that's so much what The Great Gatsby is about. And the price paid for money. And do we think money, in fact, buys us a jump in class as Gatsby's so fervent, I believe. Is that what the green light is about? Blah, blah, blah. So yeah, it's certainly central. But again, I think it's probably central to almost any novel or at least an important part of any novel. Because of everything else that goes along with it. It's like an octopus, I think. Yeah. I think money is important to my characters, many of my characters in a special way because many of them are immigrants and they have a specific reason for coming to America. America is the golden land. America is the promised venue where money will be made and it will be made available. And for a lot of them, they discover it's not that simple. It's not that easy. And therefore, money and the failed dream of money becomes important to the lives of my characters and affects the relationships also. And I think in my current novel, which is set in the Bay Area right now, money has taken on a different dimension because it seems that so many other people that one knows has made so much of it. And so the character who hasn't then says, well, what's wrong with me? And therefore, there's a whole different feel about money, which I think is very much in the air right now in the Bay Area. Money's large amounts being made, large amounts being lost, and people standing on the outside saying, well, life, here I am. Don't pass me by. I think it is also just to get back to Gatsby for a moment. It is definitely one of those light motifs. It is a through line. We followed the story through Nick Karoway, who basically is looking into the life of Gatsby, Nick Karoway, who has no money, who's watching Gatsby, who has lots of money, but it's not enough. First of all, it's not old money. And he's looking at the Buchanan's, who have more money than he has. So there's never enough. And I think that keeps running throughout too. And if there is, that's when it becomes an evil and corrupting force. And that's why I think Nick Karoway decides to split at the end of the book and get away from these people. Sir, I think we should yield to the novelists, the fiction writers. Is there a book we're afraid to write? I think I'm always afraid to write whatever I'm writing. I just think there's fear involved. And I'm working on my fourth novel. And I'm near the beginning. And in terms of money, I just thought about this, that when you select a topic or decide what you're going to write about in the characters and whether they're wealthy or this or that, you have to take money into consideration. Because I sometimes worry that people won't want to read about my characters because they're fairly poor. I'm writing about a girl growing up in East Oakland, whose mother's a drug addict, recovering addict and alcoholic. And I know there are a lot of readers who want to read about glamorous lives. And they don't want you to give them people who are struggling to pay the bills or who might have their PG&E cut off. And then there are other readers who do want to read about that. Because they can't relate, and it's different. But the people who can relate certainly don't want to read about it. So sometimes I fear making choices that will make people less interested. But I feel I have to be true to what I want to say and to the point I want to prove or the premise, et cetera. Do you ever feel a dichotomy between where you want to go and where you feel you should go? That's what I say. Yes, in that case, yes, somewhat. Sometimes you want to be successful. I think I want to be successful or continue to be successful. And at the same time, I want to write what's in my heart. I want to be true to my vision, my integrity, and all of that. So sometimes there's, I think, a conflict or a dilemma. So there are no themes within you that burn, but yet you feel you cannot touch. A one-word answer, April. This is a question for everyone. Well, while April is thinking, I want to respond a little bit to that. I think I agree with April in that writing is a scary business. It's a risky business. Every day, you're setting yourself up to fail, if not in terms of outside evaluation, in just terms of you and what you want your writing to do. A lot of times I look at a scene and I'll say, this just has to go. I mean, this is just not good enough. And there's a week's worth of work that I've thrown away. And that's scary. And that makes me not want to go back to my writing desk the next week. And so that part of it is scary. In terms of themes, I think I have ideas about things that I want to write about. And I think they will be difficult and complicated. I'm not necessarily afraid of them, because why should I be afraid? I've long stopped believing what I briefly believed in the beginning of my writing career, that all people will love me all at once. When my books come out, I know that isn't going to happen. But maybe the one topic that I do shy away from is at some point I would like to write about the life of my mother. And that she has had a very interesting and very different kind of life. She grew up in Calcutta in the period between the World Wars and underwent a lot of difficulties and came through them in wonderful ways. And I'm really very, I honor her so much. But I'm not sure she would want me to write that book. So that's the one book that I have to kind of negotiate my way around. But otherwise, I just I don't really care what other people think. If I have to write the book, I have to write it. One, but I won't go into it. There's one, I think. I'll do shades of a bed. I don't think I could do it head on. She doesn't want to tell you. Let me tell you. I think it relates, and I've dealt with the theme, it's a mother-daughter relationship. And in terms of writing about someone who didn't get adequately mothered during childhood and the desire or the quest to have it happen in adulthood. That's what it is. I mean, I can do it with a teenager or like with coffee. Like there's some of that. I don't know if I could do it at someone in their 40s or 30s. You know what I'm saying? But I think it's still, the needs are still there. Sometimes those unmet needs. It's deep, deep, deep. You did it, OK? OK, now. I suppose it's the same theme. I read Desire Under the Elms or East of Eden. And I think these families look healthy compared to mine. I'm serious. I mean, my wife still can't even believe it. She says, don't I have in-laws? Not if I can help it, you know? And I would love to write about it. They would hate it. And I don't think I'll ever get permission to do that. And it would be frightening to look at. One last question. I just wondered how much you think a writer has to stay culture bound and can somebody write about people in another culture and have themes that they want to bring out in a setting that's not their own? I went to a women's book club in Pacific Heights. And it was African-American lesbians. And they were upset at me, because in my first book I had these black characters. But a huge fight. I don't agree with them. I've been with Dorothy Allison when she's been criticized for having straight people in her books. And how could she characterize a straight? It's so ridiculous. I can't even stand it. Or I remember one guy who wrote a novel as a Chicano. He turned out to be a white guy. And it was a big scandal. Really, who cares? That's not the point of art. I think you just have to know what you're doing. If you're going to do it, be good at it. That's how I see it. Either you can or you can. You can pull it off. Go. You go, girl. But if you can't, that's how I see it. It's how you do it. Yeah. It's how you do it. I agree. I think one should not really set limits, especially for other people as to what they can write and what they can't write. Because just like we heard from the audience, reading is how you get out of yourself, outside of yourself. Writing is also how you get outside of yourself. If you really wanted to be authentic to your own experience, you could only really write about yourself. And how interesting would that be after your third or fourth novel? Or maybe even after your first one. But I think it's very important to know your facts, to check your facts with other people if you're going to write about groups or people who are very different from you of a different culture. It's no different really than from writing a historical novel. You're writing about a different time and people who are very different from you. And here you're writing about the same time but you're writing about people you're different from. And there should be a reason. There should be a reason why you choose to write about these people. Well, I think we should go out. No, I was just going to say, unfortunately, though, it seems that what happens is that, and obviously no one can write, even if they are a member of that culture, can write something that represents everybody in it. But once you start to write something and you're not a member, it seems like it opens up a whole lot of, opens you up to a lot of criticism. There's this big debate going on about the National Book Award winner, homeless bird, I think it is, which is set in India. And the woman who wrote it is not Indian and had never been there. And she's receiving a lot of criticism. Yeah, I think one has to see why people are criticizing. Is it because the book is not authentic? In that case, there's reason for criticism. Is it because she's not Indian? That's not reason enough. I mean, personally, I really like writing about my culture because I think I have a special understanding of it more than I have an understanding of other cultures. And I can reveal things about it that other people would not be able to reveal. I think that's a good reason for me to write about my culture. And as long as I continue feeling that way, I would want to write about it. But I certainly wouldn't ever want someone to restrict me and say, you can only write about this. Well, I think we should go out into the night with a sentiment from Scott Fitzgerald's editor, Max Perkins, who said, there could be nothing so important as a book can be. And I think after having heard our distinguished panelists and just the fact that you all have braved the weather tonight to come out here, I think that's a real testament to that sentiment. And just seeing what we've seen of the great Gatsby here, there is nothing so important as a book can be. Thank you all for being here tonight. She's a copster. What's the problem? Don't you have a joke about it? Well, it's not going to happen.