The New Yorker Radio Hour - James Wood Is Done “Prosecuting Wars”

Episode Date: June 15, 2018

Jane Mayer explains why Charles and David Koch are willing to spend as much as thirty million dollars on advertising that opposes Donald Trump’s campaign of tariffs—right as the midterm elections offer voters a referendum on his Presidency.  And David Remnick speaks with James Wood, the literary critic and sometime novelist.  When Wood joined The New Yorker as a literary critic, he promised that he wouldn’t “go soft”: he had been well known at The New Republic for battles with prominent writers whose styles he found flawed.  Wood tells David Remnick that he now regrets that choice of words. Changing his mind or expanding his taste needn’t be seen as form of capitulation.  Criticism itself, Wood says, has been, to some degree, a detour from his calling: writing his own fiction. Wood’s new novel, “Upstate,” follows a father—an Englishman, like Wood—as he spends time with his adult daughters.  One is an energetic corporate executive, the other a melancholy professor of philosophy. The book is a meditation on what it means to be a parent, and Wood notes that male novelists, including Karl-Ove Knausgaard and Michael Chabon, are finally beginning to write about the experience of parenting as a central concern.   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.

in the conversation with someone, when they have that revelation. It's making sure that maybe looking at this case, it could be an interesting process. Okay. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Today we're going to find out how it feels for one of the most formidable critics of fiction, the New Yorker's James Wood, to put out a novel. of his own. That's a little later.

Hello. Hey, Jane. How you doing? Good. How are you? Good. Are we rolling? We are. Great. Now, I've called up Jane Mayer because for years, Jane has been reporting on the political activities of the Koch brothers, Charles and David Coke of Coke Industries. They're among the biggest donors in conservative politics, spreading a free market and libertarian view of the world. And their influence in Washington can hardly be overstated. So Donald Trump's big people, pivot toward trade protectionism is the very last thing they want to see.

Trump seems determined to spark a trade war, imposing tariffs not only on China and Mexico, but Canada and Europe too. Charles and David Koch have now launched a campaign against those policies, right as the midterm elections give voters a referendum on the Trump presidency. Jane, the Kochs have been free trade boosters for decades. How are they reacting to Trump's behavior at the G7 and his recent round of tariffs? Well, they're against any kind of tariffs. They think that it's deleterious to their business and to the country's economy. So they're planning to spend a lot of money to oppose his policy of imposing tariffs. And so it's one of the areas that they differ from him on and they know how to make a lot of noise when they need to. They'll spend as much money as they can. How much are they spending on this anti-tariff's campaign? They've talked about spending millions.

as much as 30 million. And what form will the spending take? Can I spot a Coke advertisement on television if I look carefully? You very well may be able to. Look for ads from Americans for Prosperity. And there are a number of other allied groups that they fund. They have a Hispanic group that they fund. They have a veterans group, concerned veterans for America.

You'll see ads that will say that these tariffs are going to, to hurt poor people and consumers. They don't go out there and say, these tariffs are going to hurt Coke industries and we, who are the ninth richest men in America, which is what the two Koch brothers are. They talk about how the tariffs are going to hurt the little people. Now, what does this mean for the midterm elections? Where are the Coke's going to put their money when it comes to November? They are going to mostly do what they usually do, which is try to control Congress with their money. And so the most important for them is to keep the country from doing anything that would put a tax on carbon pollution and take action against global warming because their whole business is tied up in carbon, in fossil fuels.

The party in power almost always loses some seats in a midterm. Where are they going to concentrate? They're going to put a lot of money behind Republican candidates. And every now and then, there'll be a Democrat. There are a few straggler Democrats that they have always funded. They're Democrats where they've got some of their businesses are located, like in Arkansas. They've backed Democrats in the past. And Democrats who support the policies that they support, they'll back.

So they've done that recently with one who was supporting the gutting of the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill. What they've been able to do is create an apparatus that's like a political machine. And there's a piece by a couple scholars at Harvard who describe it as a machine that is as powerful, if not more powerful, than the Republican Party at this point. And so what they do is they use this political muscle they've got to scare Republicans into following their agenda. And they threaten those that might not by saying, we'll run somebody against you in a primary. They call it, will primary you. And so the Republicans want to tow their lines so that they don't have a primary opponent who's really well funded who might knock them out. And most of the people on the Hill face it, want to get reelected, so they go along.

Well, let's remind ourselves what the Kochs did during the election campaign. If I remember, they describe the campaign of Clinton versus Trump as having to decide between a heart attack and cancer, I think is how they put it. now they have Trump. Was tariffs the main reason that they thought this was a disease? It's part of it. The truth is that they are radical right libertarians. They want to shrink the government down to, you know, the size that it was during Calvin Coolidge's period. Calvin Coolidge is their favorite president.

And they realized that Trump is not one of them. not a libertarian. He's not an ideologue. He's a new, a different kind of breed. He's not someone they can control particularly. He doesn't necessarily share their beliefs. And if anything, he kind of aggrandizes himself as president and makes a show of a display of power as president. That none of that is their kind of politics. No, he's not silent cow. Trump is not silent cow. But they had to know this was coming. This, of of all the positions that Trump has ever taken, the one he's been pretty clear about from the start is what he's doing now on trade, isn't it? Well, right. And so this was one of the reasons they opposed

them. They would have been happy with any of the other Republican nominees, potential nominees for president in 2016. And they were ready to back any of them except Trump. And they sat on their hands, on the sidelines, waiting for a nominee to be chosen. And they, they, they sat on their hands, then they were going to throw their money into the race. And lo and behold, the one guy who they opposed got the nomination. Did they give money all the same? They had set aside a kitty of $889 million. The money was distributed in lesser amounts to many, many Senate and congressional and gubernatorial and even lower level candidates.

But they didn't put money behind Trump. But I actually feel that sort of obscures what, to me anyway, is the more important story, which is, yes, they have differences with him on trade and on immigration. Those are two major areas of difference they've got with him. But they've gotten behind him on so many other things quietly. Like what? Well, they are huge supporters of his one achievement in office legislatively, which, which, which, you know, which is the tax bill that was passed recently. It reduces corporate rates from 35 to 21%.

This is their idea of heaven. And they put $20 million into backing it in a national campaign pushing to get it through Congress. And the other thing they did, which is really something that we're going to all be dealing with the consequences for years, is that they stopped him from achieving the mechanism that he had originally intended to pay for those tax cuts, which was something called the border adjustment tax. And Paul Ryan was for it.

So you've got the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Trump was for it. You had the White House backing it. But guess what? The coax were against it and they killed it. So there's no mechanism now to make. up for the gigantic deficits that the Trump tax bill is going to create. And they're going to create a lot more pressure to keep cutting government spending. And that's what the coax won.

Jane, my understanding is that while Donald Trump himself may be somewhat distant, especially ideologically from the coax on certain issues, you've got Betsy DeVos, who's the Secretary of Education, Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, Mike Pence, who's the Vice President, obviously, they all have pretty close ties to the coax. Really close ties. So how have they been able to influence policy at, say, the Department of the Interior or the EPA, let's say? Well, so in the Department of the Interior, there is, the top lawyer there is a man named Daniel Georgiani, who was, I mean, he's worked for many years for Charles Koch, for his institute, for his foundation, and for the, Koch Brothers political organization. So he's just a kind of a right-hand man to Charles Koch,

and he's now the top lawyer in the Interior Department. And over in the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, they've got, the secretary is Scott Pruitt, who was somebody whose political career was funded from the start by the Cokes. David Coke has stepped down. He's retired. Did he do so voluntarily, or did his brother give him? him a little kick out the door? Well, I mean, the thing is he's retiring because he's in failing health. And so it was somewhat inevitable. But there was tension there, right? Yes. But according to the two of the sources I talked to who were very much in the know, he was given a push out the door by his older brother. And they said that it was done with a wink and a nod and a nudge and that David Koch really hadn't

wanted to go, but the Charles has been pushing them out for some time. Regardless of what happens with trade policy or in November, isn't it your sense that the coax have come out pretty far ahead on these two years of the Trump presidency? Despite their opposition on tariffs or immigration, they've gotten plenty out of this presidency. I mean, really, tariffs and immigration are not such central questions to them as environmental policy and tax policy and other regulatory policy. And on those areas, Trump for them is a dream come true. Jane, thanks so much. Great to be with you. Jane Mayer, staff writer at the New Yorker since 1995. Her book, Dark Money, is all about the Koch brothers' influence on American politics.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. And if you're a college student or a new grad out there looking around for a job, we've got some tips on media. the new boss. When I'm in this office, watch out. I will tear your new one, its own new one. Stick around. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. All right, sit down. So, you think you got what it takes to be my intern? Well, I think if you'll look at my resume, you'll find that I have... Shut your idiot trap for a minute, point, Dexter. Maybe you'll learn something. I'm not sure you realize. I'm a broker at the top hedge fund in New York City.

I kick ass and I don't even take names. Why? Because I don't even give a shit about other people's names. Well, if you just look at my resume, you'll see that my name is Paul. When I'm in this office, watch out. I will tear your new one its own new one. But come the weekend, I cut loose. Turn into a goddamn room temperature green tea sipping craft show watching hardcore online mahjong, enthusiast. I'm not a shark. I'm a motherfucking

orca. An orca who likes ending the day with a tall, ice-cold Odules in the commemorative glass I got on a trip to an American girl doll convention with my nieces. Hold on. I'm closing on a deal the size of an inferior country's GDP, and the SEC's been on my ass like John Wayne on a stallion. Daisy? Yeah? Be a doll and clear my evening and order up a couple of pounds of ribby because daddy's going to be taking care of business and working overtime. And do me a favor, make sure you set my DVR for that marathon of the Great British Bake-off. Already done.

Thank you. So did you want to look at my resume, maybe? You got a problem with what I'm saying? Uh, no? I can buy and sell you a thousand times over. And I'll be laughing all the way to my daily cognitive behavioral therapist appointment, punk. Where Dr. Tesla and I work on using laughter as a means of assuaging social anxiety. Yeah, that's right.

I got social anxiety and lots of it. Now get the hell out of my office. It's almost lunch, and that's my scrapbooking time. And by the way, you're hired. Yeah, you heard me. Go see Linda in HR. Idiot. I work hard, and I play soft.

By Teddy Wayne. Performed for the New Yorker Radio Hour by Ed Helms, and I'm David Remnick. Writing a novel is a don't. haunting piece of business. But for James Wood, there's an extra dimension to it all. Wood has been a literary critic at this magazine for a decade and before that at the New Republic and the Guardian. As a critic, he's alive to the infinite ways in which a book can go right or go flat. He's attuned to every detail of voice, point of view, and structure. But more than that, James has a certain

reputation. He's exacting. Sometimes when necessary, he's even been a little bit ruthless, some would say. He believes in the need for deep cultural argument, and if he makes an enemy along the way sometimes, so be it. The stakes are high, in other words. Maybe that's why it's been 15 years between James Wood's first novel and the new one. The book is called Upstate and it's set in Saratoga Springs, New York, and it follows a father, an Englishman, spending time with his adult daughters, one of them an energetic corporate executive, the other a melancholy professor of philosophy. It's a meditation on what it means to be a parent and what it means to be a family. Your critical sensitivity is incredibly acute. I mean, one of your great talents as a critic is to give a reading of a paragraph of a passage and break it down

the way a musician would, the way a musician would go into 16 bars of music and take it apart and see what it's doing and how it's working, where it's mistaken, and all the rest. How do you go about your fictional life? You teach at Harvard. You thank God, write essays for us. You do other things. You're easily the world's greatest drummer who also writes novels and literary criticism. Well, yeah, but I must say, damn good. No kidding around. But how does fiction work in your day-to-day work life? Is it an event or is it the everyday thing? No, it's definitely an event. and I think that's an explanation for why it's been 15 years since I last wrote a novel. It's an event that has to fit into making a living, being a parent, teaching, writing criticism.

It's not to say that I didn't make a daily space for it. I tried to make a daily space for it, but the novel took me a long time because I would stop for months on end, actually, when there was, say, a big piece to write or when term time just. got too much of a hassle, I would just sort of stop and say, okay, I don't do it until the summer. But that didn't bother me too much, actually, because of this mental image that was always going on, which was that... What's the mental image? The mental image was that even when I wasn't writing it, I was writing it.

The mental image was that it... Every single piece I wrote for the magazine or book I taught to the students at... Harvard, however sort of irksome or ordinary, seemed to be teaching me something. I've always felt that, actually. Now, this book, I would think, comes in large measure out of the death of your mother. The event of it, the image of it, the desire to write about it in some ways. Can you tell me a little bit about how that works? In other words, the event in life and then how it starts developing into it.

a work of art in your mind. Yeah, my mother died in 2014. And as happens when a parent dies, you reflect on a whole life, but you also reflect on the quality of parenting that made you who you are. My mother was a very complicated creature. I have to say that I feel as a lucky middle child that I got the best of it. That's to say, when I wrote a piece for the magazine about my mum, my sister who read it was in furious disagreement because her idea of my mother was of a much more hostile, much more abusive, much angrier person than mine. But where my sister and I would agree is that my mother was a depressive.

and her mother, my grandmother, had some sort of nervous breakdown in the 20s or 30s, and I actually alluded to this in the novel and had electroconvulsive therapy. So when my mother died, I was naturally reflecting on a certain legacy of happiness and unhappiness in our family that flowed from her. And then when you add to that, one's own experience as a parent, how little one can actually control, it turns out, in the lives of one's children. and the awful thought that happiness might be one of those things one can't materially affect very much, that much more is determined perhaps by DNA or by birth order or by the vagaries of personality and temperament than anything one can actually do as a parent. So that was really what was really the germ of this novel,

was thinking about the apparently arbitrary distribution. of happiness and unhappiness in families. At one point in your novel, your main character, Alan, says the following, that extraordinary power family had to blot out all other considerations, all other desires and dissatisfactions. Perhaps he'd feared that, recognized its engrossing fanaticism. If you surrender to that, you would do nothing else in life, build nothing else. How have you experienced that tension? That's pretty much me speaking right out.

I guess that. I'll put it this way. I now understand, and have done for a few years, why traditionally female writers were so wary of having children and why canonically so many didn't. There's no doubt that it is a rival engrossment to, say, the writing life. That men opt out of? I mean, traditionally, I think men did, and they don't now, which is why you're getting actually some writing by men at last about fatherhood, whether it's Knau's Guard or Sheebon or whatever. And it's not surprising. I mean, it's not just that it's rival creation and rival creativity.

It's also, of course, the fact that having a child presents you with a limited and a feasible set of projects and goals and, you know, things that, do you know what I mean? It's dullish, but very easy for me to drive my son

to endless soccer games. And it's somewhat enjoyable. And it's probably more enjoyable than sitting down to write something. Is it? It's more enjoyable than pushing the rock up the hill. Yeah, I don't actually

like writing much. Why? I feel I'm going to fail each time I do it. I guess I Just each sentence is, there's too much of an ordeal of choice around each sentence. Do you know what I mean? I do.

And there's no ordeal of choice around the fact that you have a daughter and a son, right? You just, that's it. It's what you were given and you made and you. And yet you're no less bound to fail in that endeavor too. Absolutely. Absolutely right. Do you cast yourself with, do you stake your claim with any certain living novelist now and say, I'm with her or him, and I'm not with him or her. Hmm.

Earlier in your career, you had a tendency to write a little bit more in that vein as a critic, you know, about hysterical realism or whatever it was. I'm for this tendency. I'm not with that tendency. Yeah. To some degree. I think I still, I don't think my taste has changed. My desire to prosecute wars has changed. bit, a militancy has gone. And I'm interested in opening up areas of literature to readers at the

moment. But I don't think my taste has changed. I'm still reasonably hostile to, let's say, to fantasy and the fantastic, although I'm really working hard to, you know, I'm doing my best, but I'm reasonably hostile to that and always have been. Even as a kid, I was never, I was never kid who really like comics and stuff like that. George Martin is not your thing. It's not my thing. I'm reasonably hostile to the thing I dubbed historical realism years and years ago.

Maybe you should define it. So a certain kind of what I, this is very tendentious, but I describe it as a certain kind of somewhat unsubtle comedy in which the fiction is semiforing to the reader that comic and zany and wild events are taking place.

So this exemplified by what novels are writers? So the books I was writing about when I put the boot in for historical realism were Zadie Smith's white teeth, though it was a review of white teeth, and it was also a very positive review of what I liked about white teeth, which is obvious to any reader. A tremendous energy. A comic exuberance that you don't want to diminish, but his tendencies I wanted, as a critic, I wanted to change a little bit, I guess. Salmon Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet. The Rock and Roll novel.

The Rock and Roll novel. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Pynchins, Mason and Dixon, and parts of DeLillo's underworld, not, I think, the great last 150 pages where he's sort of revisiting his childhood in the Bronx.

But again, some of the, some of this is about, I think, just talking personally, some of this for me is, I really like subtlety in fiction. So, you know what I'm talking about? Everyone,

everyone who's ever read a page of David Foster Wallace knows that there's a kind of level of genius there, which is not to be gainsaid. That you acknowledge. Absolutely. I teach at Harvard brief interviews with hideous men each year because it's a book I admire. But when Wallace is being an ironist, he tends to underline all his ironies, right? I mean, he literally italicizes them or he footnotes them. It seems to me that if you're going to be ironic, you should be subtle about your irony because that's a sort of definition of irony, right? Is that it's...

You're saying it's too cartoonish for you. Yeah, I like hidden irony rather than blatant irony. You used a great phrase, prosecuting wars. And I'll let the listeners into a little secret. When you made the jump from the New Republic to the New Yorker, your editor at the New Republic, Leon Weaselteer basically said, well, he was quite disappointed, let's say, that you were leaving and I don't blame him, but that you might go soft because somehow the New Yorker is not a place for prosecuting wars. And in fact, you said, I'm not going to go soft.

Do you feel that you have a little bit, or is that a matter of age or a matter of publication? or something else? What I'd say is I don't like the language anymore of I won't go soft. I think that was the wrong way to talk about it and I shouldn't have done in 2007. What's the better way to put it? I will expand.

Because it seems to me, and you're better here as Henry Finder, especially lately in at least the last three years, very often the project, at least it seems to me, is here's this new thing I knew nothing about. I'm enthusiastic about it and I want you to know to. That that was quite different

than what you tended to do certainly 15 years ago. Yes. So instead of saying in 2007 I won't go soft, I should have said I won't stay in the same trench. I won't stay in the same rut.

There was a tendency to repeat. I mean, this is the awful thing about prosecuting wars is that you tend to fight the same ones. Not many literary critics have written fiction, at least recently. Edmund Wilson did. There are others. How do you fit this into your writing life?

What role does it play in your writing life, imaginative life? I think I have to admit that I'm your sort of nightmare critic cliche. So that's to say I'm one of those critics who, has always been writing ghost novels, always wanted to write fiction, much more than I ever wanted to write criticism. Feel that the last 30 years has been a peculiar diversion from my ambition. So I'm definitely not in the camp of, you know, critic can't, critic merely teaches, artists does the real thing. Yeah, and I guess when I'm writing fiction, I don't actually actually. turn off the critical monitor either.

So is that is that a good thing or a problem? I think it can be a problem. There's this wonderful phrase that the V.S. Pritchett used about Ford Maddox Ford. He clearly didn't rate Ford quite as high as, you know, Proust or whatever and said, Ford never fell into that determined stupor out of which great work comes. It's a great phrase. It's a wonderful phrase. and we all know what he means

there's a certain kind of you have to put something to sleep you have to put some sort of monitor to sleep I think and I suppose there's a romantic version of it which is staying up for four nights running and just living on inspiration occasionally

while writing this novel I felt that I had I put the critical monitor to sleep and those were the moments when I truly didn't know where I was going Those are the moments where artists of all kinds talk about, you know, they use these sort of metaphors of of transport, of being taken somewhere, of not knowing where they were going, of being told something by their characters. That occasionally happened. But more often than not, for better or worse, I was still the critic.

And I guess I've come to the, I've consoled myself that that critical ability has its virtues too. when you're writing fiction, obviously enough. All writers are critics in the sense that we all have to edit and improve and chuck stuff out and do all that. Now, you're across the kitchen table from a novelist every day, Claire Bussuit, a terrific novelist. So you have two critics, two novels, and house and two bodies. You read each other and what is it like to read your wife's manuscript in what you say and what not? Yeah, it's a perilous activity, I have to say.

And perilous for the happiness of our household. How honest are you? I'm about 80% honest. But, of course, I want her to be 100% honest with me. So you say. So I say. I'm her first reader when she's finished her manuscript. She was the first reader of Upstate and tremendously helpful, I have to say.

I mean, she brought a novel aside to it and said, you know, there's a couple of strands here that you've sort of, you've lopped off too soon, and they need to be extended right to the end of the book, particularly because it's a short book. It needs to have that sense of being well-wrought. Yeah, she was great. But one, yeah, you have to hold back a little bit. With Shalom Bayet, peace in the household. Exactly.

James, thank you so much for coming by. It's a great to see you. new book is called Upstate. And he's writing about fiction all the time at The New Yorker, and you can find it, of course, at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed by Merrill Garvis of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Rianan and Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frill,

David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, Mithelie Brow, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, Michelle Moses, Emily Mann, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.