The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 43: Summer in the City

Episode Date: August 12, 2016

In this episode, F. Murray Abraham reads Arthur Miller’s essay about the sweltering summers of Miller’s youth; two writers talk fish and fiction; and a novelist recalls her childhood in idyllic Hong Kong.           New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

when they have that revelation. Packer seems to be interested in that. John McPhee has brought this up. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. So this is why they're eating the rubber legs. Oh, boy.

Nocturnal stoneflies are rolling all over the river. That's fantastic. Wow. You'd think they'd think they'd. I think they'd eat dries, wouldn't you? You'd think. Maybe they will. We'll try it for a little bit?

We'll try it dry with the nymph below it. Okay. I'm going to put this in real quick, and... This is going to be fun. This week's show comes with a warning. If a beautiful afternoon on a beautiful river sounds good to you, it just might make you jealous. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick.

Today we're going out on the Yellowstone River, some of the best trout water in the country, with two great writers, an old master and a rising star. Thomas McGuane, the elder by 40-some years, has written novels, screenplays, short stories,

and some great essays about the outdoors. The very first book by Callan Wink, a collection of stories came out just this year. In-season, he works as a fly-fishing guide in Livingston, Montana, and on one of his rare days off this summer, Callan took Tom out on the river. Callan, have you got any stories coming up?

I really love the two that I read in The New Yorker. Oh, thanks. And you young whippersnappers who go on and work for you because you did a great job, but I just hate seeing these really good short story writers turning into novelists. Well, I'm trying to do that, and it's a struggle. Well, you know, the reason I feel that way is that the American short story is getting radically better than it's ever been, and the novel's getting radically worse than it's ever been. Yeah?

Well, do you like to read short stories? I do, yeah. Okay. But I give you a better answer to that. I can do it if I'm kind of doing it all the time. Yeah. But if I do it sporadically, they just don't involve me enough. Yeah, that's kind of how, I mean, I like, I enjoy writing them.

I don't particularly enjoy reading them. You know, if you want to write what you read, like, I like to read. Like, I like to read novel, so I really want to write a good one. Yeah. And so I'm going to keep plugging away at it, I guess, so I do. But you can get in the front there, Tom. Here, more or less? Yeah, you're in.

You're in a modest mess. What are we got here? Oh, go ahead. So you've got the big dry and then the big nymph below it. Okay. So it should be fun to cast for you. That's great. Callan Wink and Tom Aguain, writers and devoted fishermen.

We'll come back to them in a bit and see what they've caught if they've caught anything at all. For the moment, though, we're going to leave the cool waters of the Yellowstone and come back to the steaming asphalt of Manhattan. There's not a day of the summer that I don't give thanks to the genius who invented air conditioning. Now, some years back, the New Yorker asked a group of writers for their memories of summer. And the great playwright Arthur Miller, who was 80-something at the time, the time, wrote an essay about his childhood summers, when you had to work a lot harder to beat the heat. Here's Arthur Miller's before air conditioning, read by F. Murray Abraham.

Exactly what year it was, I can no longer recall, probably 1927 or 28. There was an extraordinarily hot September, which hung on even after school had started, and we were back from our Rockaway Beach bungalow. Every window in New York was open. And on the streets, Benders manning little carts, chopped ice and sprinkled colored sugar over mounds of it for a couple of pennies. We kids would jump onto the back steps of the slow-moving horse-drawn ice wagons and steal a chip or two. The ice smelled vaguely of manure but cooled palm and tongue. People on West 110th Street, where I lived, were a little too bourgeois to sit out on their fire escapes, but around the corner on 111th and farther uptown,

mattresses were put out as night fell, and whole families lay on those iron balconies in their underwear. Even through the nights, the pall of heat never broke. With a couple of other kids, I would go across 110th to the park and walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks,

which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock's tick syncopating with another's. Babies cried in the darkness, men's deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh beside the lake. I can recall only white people spread out on the grass. Harlem began above 116th Street then. Later on, in the Depression 30s, the summer seemed even hotter.

Out west, it was the time of the red sun and the dust storms, when whole desiccated farms blew away and sent the okeys whom Steinbeck immortalized out on their desperate treks toward the Pacific. My father had a small coat factory on 39th Street then with about a dozen men working sewing machines. Just to watch some handling thick, woolen winter coats in that heat was for me a torture.

The cutters were on piecework, paid by the number of seams they finished, so their lunch break was short, 15 to 20 minutes. They brought their own food. Bunches of radishes, a tomato perhaps, cucumbers, and a jar of thick sour cream, which went into a bowl they kept under the machines. A small loaf of pumpernickel also materialized, which they tore apart and used as a spoon to scoop up the cream and vegetables. The men sweated a lot in those lofts, and I remember one worker who had a peculiar way of dripping. He was a tiny,

manny fellow who disdame scissors. And at the end of a scene, always bit off the thread instead of cutting it so that inch-long strands stuck to his lower lip, and by the end of the day, he had a multicolored beard. His sweat poured onto those thread ends and dripped down onto the cloth, which he was constantly blotting with a rag. Given the heat, people smelled, of course, but some smelled a lot worse than others. One cutter in my father's shirt, was a horse in this respect, and my father, who normally had no sense of smell, no one understood why, claimed that he could smell this man and would address him only from a distance. In order to make as much money as possible, this fellow would start work at half-past five in the

morning and continue until midnight. He owned Bronx apartment houses and land in Florida and Jersey and seemed half mad with greed. He had a powerful, physique, a very straight spine, a tangle of hair and a black shadow on his cheeks. He snorted like a horse as he pushed the cutting machine, following his patterns through some 18 layers of winter coat material. One late afternoon, he blinked his eyes hard against the burning sweat as he held down the material with his left hand and pressed the vertical razor-sharp reciprocating blade with his right. The blade sliced through his index finger at the second joint, angrily refusing to go to the hospital. He ran tap water over the stump, wrapped his hand in a towel, and went right on cutting, snorting, and stinking.

When the blood began to show through the towel's bunched layers, my father pulled the plug on the machine and ordered him to the hospital. But he was back at work the next morning and worked right through the day and ended. the evening as usual, piling up his apartment houses. There was still elevated trains then, along second, third, sixth, and ninth avenues, and many of the cars were wooden with windows that opened. Broadway had opened trolleys with no sidewalls, in which you at least caught the breeze, hot though it was, so that desperate people, unable to endure their apartments, would simply pay a nickel and ride around aimlessly for a couple of hours to cool off. As for Coney, island on weekends. Block after block of beach was so jammed with people that it was barely possible to

find a space to sit or to put down your book or your hot dog. My first direct contact with an air conditioner came only in the 60s when I was living in the Chelsea Hotel. The so-called management sent up a machine on casters, which rather aimlessly cooled and sometimes heated the air, relying as it did on pictures of water that one had to pour into it. On the initial filling, it would spray water all over the room, so one had to face it toward the bathroom rather than the bed. A South African gentleman once told me that New York in August was hotter than any place he knew in Africa, yet people here dressed for a northern city.

He had wanted to wear shorts but feared that he would be arrested for indecent exposure. High heat created irrational solutions, linen suits that collapsed into deep wrinkles when one bent an arm or a knee. And men's straw hats as stiff as matzes, which, like some kind of hard yellow flower, bloomed annually all over the city on a certain sacred date, June 1st or so. Those hats dug deep pink creases around men's foreheads, and the wrinkled suits, which were supposedly cooler, had to be pulled down and up and sideways to make room for the body within. The city and summer floated in a daze

that moved otherwise sensible people to repeat endlessly the brainless greeting, hot enough for you. It was like the final joke before the meltdown of the world in a pool of sweat. That's F. Murray Abraham, reading before air conditioning by Arthur Miller.

It was published in the New Yorker in 1998 as part of a series by different writers called American Summer. You can find all those pieces at New YorkerRadio.org. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Next stop, Hong Kong. Stick around. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

The novelist Janice Y. K. Lee grew up in Hong Kong, and she's made that world her subject. It's all about the complicated relationships of wealth and power among Chinese, Americans, British, and immigrants from all over Asia. Lee is the author of the piano teacher, a romance set around World War II, and recently The Expatriots, which takes place right about now. The new expatriates arrive practically on the hour, every day of the week. They get off Cathay Pacific flights from New York, B.A. from London, Garuda from Jakarta, A&A from Tokyo, carrying briefcases, carrying Louis Vuitton handbags, carrying babies and bottles,

carrying exhaustion and excitement and frustration. They've mostly been cramped in coach. A precious few have drunk champagne in first. Others have watched two movies in business class eating a Hammondree sandwich. They are thrilled. They are homesick. They are scared.

They are relieved to have arrived in Hong Kong. Their new home for six months, a year, a three-year contract max. Forever. Who knows? They're fresh-faced. They're mid-career, hoping for that crucial boost up the latter. They're here for their last job.

The final rung before they're put out to pasture. That's from the expatriates, the new novel by Janice Y. K. Lee. She recently sat down with the New Yorker staff writer, Jayang Fan. In one book review that I read of the expatriates, you were called the modern Henry James, but funnier, which is not bad accolade for... And female. And don't forget female. And female for an author.

And certainly part of my pleasure of reading your books, was your granular observation of class distinctions and also of, you know, cultural tribalism in Hong Kong. What is it about the city that, you know, drew you to writing about it? You know, I was born and raised in Hong Kong. I'm Korean. My parents had moved to Hong Kong a year before I was born. So I always felt like a local, but I would think a lot of local Chinese would not say I'm a local. And that was often the first thing they would identify about me that I wasn't Chinese. I was this Korean kid in the American school in Hong Kong, which was a British colony in China. That's a lot to sort of digest. I've never felt fully part of any group, which I think is really helpful for a writer.

It helps you have some distance and become more of an observer. So, you know, first I started writing my first novel, The Piano Teacher, about a situation that I had encountered as a child myself. I had piano lessons from this English piano teacher. That sort of situation interested me, that an English woman would be teaching an Asian child in an Asian city that used to be a colonial city. And, you know, I never would have told you that I would have written a historical novel set in Hong Kong as my first novel.

You know, for all of my 20s, I'd been writing about 20-somethings in New York or Korean-Americans or, you know, things that were sort of more immediate to me. But I found that the distance was helpful. I liked writing about something that was so different. It's basically a colonial novel set in World War II, which is about as far from my experiences as you can get. I wondered, you know, after attending college in the U.S. and living in New York for a while, as I know you did,

and then returning to Hong Kong with your husband in 2005, I think, it was, what was that experience like? When I moved back to Hong Kong, It was, you know, as an adult and I seemed like an American, but at the same time, I wasn't an American expat. I was coming back home. My parents still live there. So I knew exactly what I was getting into, because it wasn't my world when I lived in Hong Kong, but it was a world of all my friends and my friends' parents because they were the American expats. And I knew that by going there, you know, from America with my American husband and my pretty, you know, my kids were young at the time. I knew where we were going to live. I knew where we were going to send our kids to school.

It was all sort of, I knew, and I felt ambivalent about it. But off we went, because jobs are important. And I knew that, you know, I was going to have these very different lives where I had this local life and then I had this expat life. But that's okay, because I, you know, I've lived my whole life with a lot of duality and plurality, I guess. You know, I grew up in, I was born in China, and I grew up there until the age of eight. And for me, Hong Kong was a mythical place. This was, I was born in the mid-80s, and Hong Kong music, Hong Kong fashion. Even the skyline of the city was iconic.

And I think I would have given anything to trade places with you. I think Hong Kong always had that very glamorous image, you know, way back when from movies and books about it. And I was certainly aware that we had a lot of privileges compared to even when we went back to Korea in the 70s and 80s, that we had a lot more. And we couldn't even think about China because it was so closed off at that time. So I can imagine from sort of like looking from the mainland to Hong Kong how those freedoms and that wealth must have seen like Valhalla. But I was a kid. And so you just, you're like, this is where I live. and it didn't seem glamorous.

You know, a lot of times people think of the skyline of Hong Kong, but you can have a very idyllic childhood there, and it's very quiet for a time we lived above sort of a beach that was backed by a farm. So I would just go downstairs in my apartment building, and we'd go through the farm and go to the beach. Oh, that sounds amazing. It really, and it was so safe. And so these were the things I thought about Hong Kong,

and I didn't think about the glamour, you know, but there was those things. that made me realize we're living in a world city. Now, as a Korean who is being educated in English in Hong Kong, did that mean that you were speaking three languages at the same time as a child? I'm comfortable in English and Korean and French and speaking, but actually it's funny. My Mandarin and Cantonese are not so good.

You know, I think that's part of having a language that you are schooled in. And for me, too, that has come to be English. But for me, I think what struck me about being in Hong Kong as a 17-year-old visiting my best friend on a break from boarding school was as an American who grew up in mainland China, I only knew how to speak Mandarin and English. And there was this very weird moment in which if I spoke, this was in 99, so, you know, some years back. But if I spoke Mandarin Chinese, I was looked down upon. And if I spoke English, I was considered snobbish or uppity. And I felt very much judged no matter what I spoke. And I wonder if since the departure of the British and the arrival amass of mainlanders,

if local Hong Kong citizens see themselves differently, if there's any change in their sense of identity. Right. There's a passage in the book about how local Hong Kong Chinese are like the landed gentry, and they're beset by the mainlanders who like come in droves with their money and their loud voices and they're sometimes terrible travel habits. So I think there's so much tension. And I think that local Chinese both need and hate to know.

need the mainland Chinese. I mean, they complain so much about how they come and they buy up things like baby formula and Ferreira Roche, that chocolate that somehow become like the gift of choice in China. I love that. I know. So like baby formula and Ferreira Rochet are like these smuggled goods because you can only take out like two containers of baby formula per person. And they like, they come and because of the sheer number of people like sometimes it became difficult for locals to to get baby formula for their own babies. is obviously a very fraught situation. But, you know, they complain so much.

And then there was a period, I think, where tourism has dropped, and now Hong Kong is hurting. Like, they need the mainland Chinese tourists, but they love to complain about them and, like, put videos on the Internet about how badly behaved there. But it's all, you know, integral to the economy. It's very tricky. In a book, I was really struck by how much hired help figured into the lives of these very, very, capable, independent woman. And I wondered, as you write, hired help is much more expensive here in the States and not as common. Does the prevalence of maids and servants in Hong Kong shape its social reality in some way? Do you think it... Absolutely. I mean, we have to

remember, though, that the idea of domestic help in Hong Kong did not come about for the comfort of American expats, which is what is written about in my book. It's a very small segment of the population. It's a program that the Hong Kong government entered into with the government of other countries to bring affordable help so that Hong Kong's local population could have two working parents in order to afford the very expensive lifestyle. Like real estate in Hong Kong is about as expensive as you can get. But for people coming from a different country, a different economy, where the rate exchange for, I guess, lack of a better word, is more favorable. It's very, very inexpensive. And when I went to Hong Kong from the U.S., I had a baby and I had a two-year-old.

And so for me, it was a wonderful change because it gave me more time. Like, I had felt all this guilt about not doing every single thing for my child, and I had no time to work. And when I got to Hong Kong, I was able to work because I wasn't expected to be with my child every minute of the day. I can imagine, especially for a writer or anyone in the creative field, it's a lot more liberating. And, you know, that gets us to the three main characters in expatriates, all of whom I found very compelling. They're all women. They're very intelligent and well-educated. But in this new environment, they're made to somehow feel superfluous for different reasons.

Can you talk a little bit about the sexism? If that's the right word that you observed in Asia versus what it's like in the West, is it a difference in quality or, you know, degree? Well, it's hard for me to talk about Asia as a whole because the world I depict and the expatriage is so Western. I mean, I would say 95% of the people in the book are American and not even just expats. They're American. So I feel like the sexism or any sort of gender perspective that you see in that section, would be the same in the U.S. just because of the same people.

They just happen to be in another city. And it's underlined by the fact that these women are there and they don't work. And they're there because of their husband's job, so that then makes them feel more superfluous than if they were at home and working. So I don't, you know, I don't like to think of it as sort of a gender perspective in Asia because it's not. It's like a gender perspective in an American expad bubble in Asia. Right. Though in the book there is, I thought there was a very vivid passage about, I believe, a character recalling, you know, how many spouses had been left by their husbands and how traumatic that is for the woman.

And I would think that especially if you are a trailing spouse and you come to a foreign country for the sake of your husband and if he leaves you. you, then there's this real emptiness because professionally you have nothing and after your family breaks apart, that really leaves you in a vacuum. And that's problematic geographically as well because a lot of the times they can't leave because, you know, there are legal ramifications to having children with someone and, you know, how far away you can take them. So I think it was evident that that happened a lot. And, you know, I don't know that it happened more than it does in the U.S., but because the community, was so small. It just, we heard about it more. Were there any husbands that came to Hong Kong with,

was there ever a trailing husband that came with their wife? But, you know, the mommies didn't want to hang out with him. Janice Y. K. Lee, author of the piano teacher and the expatriates, talking with the New Yorker's Jayong Fan. Now let's leave behind the city and head back to the river. The Yellowstone River in Montana, where two writers went to catch some trout and talk about fiction. Tom McGuane and Callan Wink are separated by more than four decades in age,

but they've got quite a bit in common. They both grew up in Michigan. They both worked as fishing guys. They both adopted Montana as their home, and they both write fiction, thankfully, for the New Yorker. And right now, they're both in a 15-foot drift boat with a couple of fly-rods and a box of tackle, which sounds like a little bit of heaven to me right about now.

I don't know what that was. That one looked kind of good. We're not exactly lighten them up here this morning, Tom. That's all right. I can't believe we haven't gotten a... I'll eat on that nymph yet. If we go another half mile with no action, we're going to have to reconsider our lives here.

Should it sounds like fishing to me. How is the fishing been this like? this early season. It's just really getting going. Yeah, it's just been getting going. It cleared early this year. We didn't have our normal long runoff. You see the water is still, it's still a little up and slightly cloudy here.

The Yellowstone is interesting and that it doesn't, it never runs perfectly clear like some other rivers you see. Because it is the longest undammed river in the lower. 48 I think it always carries some sediment in the flow. With lots of headwaters that can blow out individually. They all have a little different color too. Yep, that's exactly right. When it's brown, that comes from the Lamar.

When it's this kind of milky green, that's from the gardener. Okay, so. Oh, we got a little split shot, little rubber leg, woolly bugger thing. They were eating that yesterday. yesterday pretty well. Again, we were fishing it under an indicator yesterday, so a little different presentation, but if you just kind of cast towards the bank and give it a slow strip, we'll see what happens. We'll do. So what are you working on now? Well, I'm pulling together my collected stories for the fall. Knopf's going to publish them in the spring,

and I've started a novel. It's been kind of an interesting, you know, at this age, I partly don't really want to get obsessed with something for three or four years. You know, there's too many, I like the world too much. Yeah. And, but I'm sort of heading that way. And I've started this novel that sort of combines some of the stuff about my life when I was living in Key West and guiding part-time. And it was an unbelievable era for those of us who were there then. and then I really never

written much about my family or my growing up and stuff like that and I've sort of found a way to include it in that story I come from a remarkably dysfunctional family and they were so spectacularly dysfunctional I never could figure out how to write about them it's not close enough is it? No it's perfect

oh is it okay get it in there too far it's just gonna get snagged that one might have been a problem I'd take a white fish right now, Tom. I mean, that's where I'm at right now. You're worried about more than I am. I'm just thinking about writing.

I have to make sure I pay attention. Yeah. Are you on the everyday program right now? No, not really. It's pretty good. Yeah, I feel like when I have a good stint of doing it a lot, and then I then it just all becomes easier you know oh that's absolutely right taken a month off like I basically do Guiding even a couple months right you know it then it's just a torturous process to get back

anything in shape for writing I think you know that that is the best reason for having regular work hours is just to not beat yourself up when you try to start up again Yeah. Yeah, I guess when it comes down to it, there does need to be. Oh, man. I find one off. Heartbreak. That was a little guy, I think.

That's what we'll tell ourselves. We want anything, though, right? Yeah. And then do you ever just get one that just comes out? Oh, yeah. Like, it comes out. Dead easy. It's almost finished, you know?

Yep. Then you're like, how did that happen? How can I do that again? I know. You just keep maneuvering, hoping you'll get your head in a place to do that. I always think of this thing. I remember reading a long ago. It's been in my mind a lot where check off as often as summer dacha.

He's writing a story. And he's almost done with it. This thunderstorm comes up. Rainy thunderstorm blows all his papers out into the yard and rains on him. And he was nearly finished with a story. And his house guests said, you know, it's not a big problem. You just finish, just go a while freshen your mind, go back and write it again. Chekhov said, I don't remember anything about it.

I thought that's really a true story. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I've had one kind of disappear into the nether world of the Internet or, you know, the computer one time. Kiss a goodbye, right? It was just like, I was pissed about that for days. I'm sure. Well, you know, John Chiever said that all fiction writing is basically improvisatory. And I agree with that, you know.

Yeah, it seems like quite often when I get to the end of a first draft, I have to go back and, like, redo the whole beginning because it was starting off in a certain way. Like, I had an idea. Right. And then, yeah, a page or two in, the story is completely taken. It almost makes you feel you don't need an idea. You just need to go to work. Yeah, yeah.

And that's kind of what I strive to do. I'm not always good at it, but just starting with something. I think kind of waiting for a good idea is one of the many subtle things. forms procrastination takes. Or not even waiting for one, or just even the belief that you need one, is in itself procrastination. Yeah, that's true. And that's what makes, when you're not writing, makes you feel so guilty.

At least I'm speaking of me personally. No, I know exactly what you mean. Well, at 76, that's exactly how I feel. If I don't write, I just feel like, my life is... You know, just I'm throwing it away. That's amazing. You still have the burn to do it. Yeah, I really do.

Maybe more than ever. I hope I still have some of that. I hope there's one. We'd had enough, hadn't we, Colin? I was just going to sit here until you hooked one, basically. So I'm glad it happened eventually. That's a nice fish. Real nice.

They're strong down here. I mean, it's a little rainbow. I know. There's plenty of boogie. They're kind of strong down here. They must not have learned the catch and release routine here. No, there's not a mark on this fish. Yeah, a pretty good one.

Thank you. I've been living on a row. ranch of some kind or another for over 40 years and for a long time running a lot of cattle and and if you were in the house you were you were a shirker yeah you know you know you know you know I would sneak to to be to do my writing where no one could catch me at it was like I had some kind of sick masturbating habit or something and I think that was one of the reasons I got so into kind of rodeo type stuff, you know. It was like build up my legitimacy with these people. I can say, oh, he's in the house all the weekend, but he won the

roping. Yeah. And then that was okay. Oh, there's one. Yeah, I mean, it's the, they, uh, they kind of, I don't know if you feel like you got, I mean, kind of the brand as a Western writer. I mean. Yeah, I mean, I know. And I don't really want that brand. Yeah, yeah. It's, yeah, what is Western writing? I know.

It used to be, you know, even in my years in the West, it used to be a lot of writers who were local writers like Ivan Doig and Mary Clearmine Blue and... Let's keep going left here. Bill Kittridge and all these people. A lot of what they wrote was almost like land claim. You know, it's what I call prior appropriation memoirs. You know, Mary Clearmine Blue's stories about my grandpa was here in 1890.

I remember the five bottom plow on the old... And it was, she's a good writer and stuff like that, but it was all about, you know, a kind of Ersat's nativism that I found kind of tiresome. You know, and I remember, you know, even Wallace Stegner was kind of complaining that, you know, Western literature didn't, was all sort of historical, you know. You had, you know, only to like 5% of Montana's are ranchers. But there's been a feeling for a long time, you know, it's all your stories supposed to be kind of ranch stories.

And there's just, you know, you never meet people of the kind in Western fiction. It's changing, but you never would meet anybody in Western fiction that resemble anything like the people you knew in Western towns, which are like, a lot like people everywhere else. But that's changing, but it is considered, you know, violating the myth. There he was. That was a... Got a little cloud cover all of a sudden.

You might start actually biting. Well, that was good. You got a look on that top fly. Yeah, I know. I need to be looking when it was looking. That was always Jim's classic move. Looking for his cigarettes. Yeah.

You know? I know. That's when he'd get one. I know. God, what a cigarette habit he had. Did you hit that to the right here? Just right out to the middle. Okay. I knew Jim Harrison from the time we were at school together, and he had this unusual,

charismatic personality, and was a real driven lover of everything about literature. He was an irresistible guy. But he also, in addition to being so artistically inclined, he loved the outdoors and loved to hunt and fish. So anyway, we got along immediately and stayed in touch all our lives, really. I grew up reading him because he lived in Michigan. He was born very near where I was born, actually.

So my dad was always a big fan. Yeah, we had some good times on the river, you know. I'd take him a handful of times every summer. And, you know, with Jim, like the fishing was of marginal importance, but he would call me several times the night before we were supposed to go to make sure that I remembered the salt for the chicken thighs and the hot sauce and the hot peppers and, you know, things like that. That's where his main concerns were around what we were going to have for lunch. Yeah, I know. And making sure that I didn't forget it. Yeah. You could be in a lot of fish, we'd have to go eat.

Yeah. That's great. Should have saved some of the voicemails he left me. I mean, they're just classic. And he would always call and be like, hey, this is Jim Harrison. Like, full name. Like, I couldn't recognize. who he was.

Right. That's funny. That's a good point. Well, you know, he was so unlike anybody who will ever know that, you know, his absence is pretty powerful, isn't it really? Yeah, I mean, he's just kind of always been, always been around, been Jim, you know. It's kind of surprising to... But not having Jim to write to is a hardship, right?

I have to be honest about that. Yeah, I mean, how often were you going to? guys writing? Every week at the least. That's amazing. But usually more than that. Yeah. And not always consequentially. It's just, you know, I always felt like I had something in my mind. Yeah. Often something nobody else would be interested in, you know, or get. There, I just dab it up to the gym. Well, that's just a cool collection of letters. I mean, you know, that people are going to want to read those. I'm going to edit mine with a heavy hand.

There's a lot of disreputable things that I didn't want to talk about. So okay, swing that left now. I mean, those are all the things everyone's going to want to read. You realize that. Yeah, I know. I go left here. Over here?

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Harrison, you know, he's a rascal, you know. Yeah. I mean, for example, I was working on this story when Tyne Harrison was that. He liked the title, so he just took it. Legends of the Fall. Are you serious? Yeah.

I had never heard that. Yeah. That was your title. That was my title. Oh, that's classic. But what he did with it was way more than what I was going to do with it. So it was okay with me. Yeah, that one you kind of have to be like, well.

Yeah. worth it. Give that one up. That's still a great book. I mean, I reread it last year. I mean, it's extremely good. And full of emotion. Yeah. You know, there's somewhat cold, well-done stuff out there. There's something that really gives you heartaches. It's kind of rare. Nearing the end here. The end is nigh. Jeez, this has been a nice little jaunt. Cocked up fish.

No one fell in. No one fell in. I used to always say that at about this point in my day. Oh, you know, good success. We caught some fish. No one fell in. And then, of course, at one point, after I had said that, between like here and the boat launch, a guy fell in, you know,

after I made my statement. I was like, I got to stop saying that until we're in the car. It's what I hear over in my county, you'll say to people, you say, how are the kids? And they'll say, well, nobody's in jail. It's like, it's the basics. Yeah, yeah. Can't expect too much more than that.

You really can't. Callan Wink and Tom Aguain. You can find some of their stories at new yorkerradio.org. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. I'm David Remnick, and you're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining me today. Next week on the program, we're going to look at a critical moment in the history of our times. For my money, the most important event in the post-war era.

25 years ago this month, a military, and KGB coup, attempted to topple Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, and end his reforms and bring hardline communist rule back to the Soviet Union. We were woken up by a call from closest friends of ours. They said, switch on television. You have a coup in Moscow. And we very much expected that things will go back the way they used to be and worse. Journalist Masha Lippman and others talking about Russia then,

And now. That's next week on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Now, one of the amazing people I work with at The New Yorker is a guy named Henry Finder. He's an editor at the magazine, and he's got to be about the best red person I've ever met or you've ever met. He reads everything and he's interested in all of it. Still, I have to admit, I was surprised when Henry started talking about his enthusiasm for a series of comic books called monstrous. I think for a lot of readers, you know, wide-ranging readers, it's become hard, not. to take cognizance of comic books these days. It's just become an explosion of creativity.

Monstrous comes out not long ago, and it created an amazing stir. Even though I would struggle to describe the world that it creates, it involves a tribe of witch scientists hunting magical, half-human creatures. Our heroine is a young warrior who finds herself possessed by an ancient, possibly malevolent spirit. The story is rendered in a very, visual style that makes reference to Japanese manga, Aubrey Beardsley, Victorian architecture,

the art of ancient China, and you just find yourself possessed by it. Monstrous is the work of the writer Marjorie Liu, who collaborated with the artist Sona Takeda. Lou is an old hand at comic writing. She spent years as one of the very few female writers working for Marvel Comics, where she wrote characters like The X-Men and Black Widow. But Monstrous is her first original story. She joined me to talk about it. Marjorie, I've just struggled to describe what Monstrous is about.

How do you describe the book? So Monstrous is sort of like Game of Thrones meets Miyazaki, meets Steampunk, meets Godzilla. That's one way of putting it. It's basically about this girl who has survived, this cataclysmic war, and she's trying to put herself back together again. She feels like that she has lost her humanity.

She feels like a monster, and for good reason, because she has a literal monster inside of her. She doesn't know what it is, but it's beginning to take over her body and her mind. Monstrous takes place in a world that's so specific and so completely unfamiliar. Why is this the first original story that you decided to tell? Well, I always had this vision in my head of a girl standing alone on a battlefield. field. And I think this feeling in my heart of the solitude of this person, you know, the loneliness of this person, the emptiness, came from a childhood listening to my grandmother, talk about the war. My dad is Chinese and he immigrated in the late 70s. My grandfather was a major general in the

Chinese Air Force. My grandmother, on the other hand, when she was 14 years old, she had to leave her village because the Japanese troops were coming. And she ended up walking over a thousand miles as part of this march of refugees. And the stories she would tell were just hair raising. At the time, it didn't strike me as odd that she could tell these stories and laugh. As an adult, looking back on it, when I think about some of the things that she would share with us, you know, I marvel at the fact that she could still smile about it. And so when I was working on monsters, I was thinking, okay, Here's this girl and she has survived this war. And she didn't survive it in a cute way.

She has really like has been psychically just ripped apart. How would a girl like that put herself together, regain her humanity in a way that would allow her 20, 30 years from now to be able to look back and tell her grandchildren some of what happened to her and laugh? It's interesting that you've chosen such a fantastical setting for a story that's so deeply rooted in your life and your own family history. What's interesting about that in hindsight is that when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, everything that I read, the protagonists were almost always white. And there was no mirror that I could hold up in front of me, you know, in which I could look into it and say, oh, I recognize that person. So if you would ask me 10 years ago, you know, what my books are about, I would have said, oh, I write about shapeshifters and psychics. but what I actually write about, the themes that have carried me through all these years, are those of people who have been othered.

And in these books, these people who are othered are always looking for community and home and family and friendship and love. So you're playing with fire in a way. This whole approach is itself sort of imbued with this long tradition, you know, the traditions of which the other is supernaturally. So in a way you're exploring what was Jesse Williams' line, were magical but were real? People of color, we're not always seen as quite human. I think about how Chinese or Asianness is often depicted in a sort of a heightened fantasy context,

where we are these mystical, you know, ninja, shaman creatures that are imbued with, like, fantastic Asian powers. It's a fantasy of what Asia is. Now, what I'm doing is I'm not engaging in sort of the Orientalist tropes that were accustomed to in the West. I'm writing like a fantasy novel, you know, a graphic novel that is set in Asia. And as someone who's actually aware of any possible tropes that are out there, it's my job to either avoid them or subvert them. Now, the other striking thing about monstrous is a sense of a matriarchy. People who seem to be ruling things are all women.

There are men, but they're mainly subaltern. Our hero is a woman, of course. This is the inverse of the usual comic book formula. Well, why not? I mean, the thing is, I always found the smurfs really weird. You know, you think about the smirfs. And there's one female smurf and there's like a whole village of male smurse. That's kind of weird.

Now that you mention. Yeah. And I just think about a lot of the popular culture that I grew up with, whether it was film or television, you would see a bunch of dudes and there might be one woman. That's not real life. And I thought, okay, well, why not just reverse this without comment and write a story in which it's all women having adventures and being the ones in charge. I wonder if some of our listeners might be surprised

to discover that you're taking on these ambitious ideas in the form of a comic. But then it strikes me, you've addressed similarly ambitious ideas in some of your other comic writing. Famously, you're at the issue of astonishing X-Men that featured the first gay marriage in the Marvel universe.

And at its heart, a series like The X-Men is really about prejudice and ultimately equality. Yes, the X-Men embody this beautiful idea that inclusion isn't just a great thing. Inclusion is necessary to the survival of us all. It's interesting because even though these are the themes that the X-Men have carried, we don't really necessarily see that playing out in the creators themselves who are writing the X-Men. It's a theme, but it's not necessarily a practice.

Anita Sarkesian was on this show and talked a bit about her experience with Gamergate. You've talked about representation, non-representation, but let's go further. The atmosphere of sexism? Do we find that in the industry? Do we find it in Comic-Con? Yes, yes. Two double yeses to that. I'm working in an industry in which at the two mainstream companies, DC and Marvel,

there are very, very, very, very few. female creators. For years and years and years, I would have girls, young women coming up to me, saying, I want to write comics. But everyone tells me that women can't write comics. And I'd be like, okay, well, that's just BS. That is an establishment trying to protect their privilege.

But I have been told by top editors at Marvel that women cannot write superheroes. Really? Because women don't read about superheroes. You know that's not true. Clearly. Clearly, this is not true. clearly, the medium is becoming a greater part of our pop culture experience.

And because of that, I have a great deal of hope that the more that this is out there, the more we will attract diverse creators, diverse voices, who will be knocking against the walls, knocking on the doors, and creating their own work. There's a larger trend in terms of comics, commenting on the world. You know, historically, if you think of comic books that weren't the kind of standard issue, the more indie versions like Harvey Picard or Robert Crum, you know, you would get the sense.

And then there was the turn toward weightier graphic novels like Joe Sacco's work. I love Joe Sacco. Or, of course, you know, the great R. Spiegelman's mouse. And so now it feels that even more mainstream. stream serialized comics are able to take on the big issues. The beautiful thing about comics is that they are that intersection between prose and film, in which we can capture both the visual nature of film, but also the interiority of a novel. And the beautiful thing about that is that it allows both the eye and the mind to bear witness in tandem.

And so you become immersed. You become surrounded by the story in ways that you might not necessarily be if you were just reading prose. And I think that this has become a medium in which people are coming into it and saying, wow, this is an opportunity for me to live in stories. You know, I can live in a novel, but living in a comic book and a graphic novel is a very, very different experience. And I think that it's one that people are waking up to. And for many, many years, comics were seen as childish and remedial. And that's changing. That is absolutely changing for the better.

Marjorie Lou, the author of the comic book series Monstrous. She spoke with Henry Finder, who's the editorial director of The New Yorker. Now, we heard from a lot of writers today. Marjorie Lou, Janice Y. K. Lee, Callan Wink, Thomas McGuane, and you can find out about all of their work at New YorkerRadio.org. And you can hear McGuane read his story, papaya on The Author's Voice, a podcast from The New Yorker,

wherever you subscribe to podcasts. I'm David Remnick. Thanks so much, and see you next week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Rian and Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Raphael, and Stephen Valentino with help from Owen Agnew, Alex Barron, Becky Cooper, and Deborah Treasman. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported

in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.