Author, author

A talk with Hester Kaplan and Michael Stein

by Johnette Rodriguez

Hester Kaplan

Husband-and-wife writers Michael Stein and Hester Kaplan came to Providence 12 years ago when Stein took a position in the medical school at Brown University, conducting AIDS research at Rhode Island Hospital. Kaplan formerly worked in publishing and did writing for lay medical texts. She grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the daughter of biographer Justin Kaplan and novelist Anne Bernays, and published an award-winning book of short stories, The Edge of Marriage, in 1999. Her new novel, Kinship Theory, in which a mother bears a surrogate child for her daughter, continues to explore issues of marriage, family, and responsibility. New Jerseyite Stein has published two previous novels, the PEN/Faulkner-nominated Probabilities (1995) and The White Life (1999). His new novel, The Lynching Tree, puts an unusual spin on the topic of racially-motivated police violence.

Speaking with them recently in their East Side home, I was quickly aware of the continuous give-and-take between these two writers, both of whom are articulate, thoughtful, and witty. The banter that follows illustrates all three qualities.

Q: Michael, how did you get into medicine and writing? I know there are a lot of doctors who do it, but . . .
S: There aren't so many doctors who do it. There are a few, and you know, they're not very good -- but they're taking up room. There are certain historical figures in the mix. But there are only a few of them who are serious writers and only a few of them are serious doctors. And I would consider almost none of them serious writers and doctors.
K: Really? That's a very grand statement.
S: Really. So, here's the story. People who want to be writers -- they've always wanted to be writers. They get sidetracked and sometimes they get back to it. That would be me. And then there are people who are doctors who decide that they want to be writers, and they're hopeless. They can't really ever make it there. They think, "That's like a specialty I could do, like dermatology, I could learn that." But they can't really.
K: You don't actually believe this, do you?
A: Yeah, I do. Now, you have to understand I'm separating fiction from non-fiction, though I know that's not what people do anymore. And many doctors can be quite good at journalism and writing about medicine.

Q: What did you study in college?
S: Biochemistry. I never wrote in college. I had fantasies of being a writer, and I was able to live my fantasies by having friends who were writers. All of my friends were writers; none of them were doctors. That should have told me something.
K: Yeah, that you were the only sane one of the bunch.
S: Now my friends are doctors and not writers, because writers can't have friends. They can't have friends who are other writers, because writers aren't good friends.
K: How about the fact that you're married to one?
S: That's different. Writers can't have friends who are writers, because it's essentially not a trusting relationship.
K: I have lots of good friends who are writers.

Q: Tell me how both of you combine writing life and family life.
K: We don't.
S: Of course we do.
K: Writing life and family life?
S: C'mon. She reads everything and edits everything I write.
K: That's true. And he reads everything I write. But in terms of combining it with family life?

Q: I meant, how do you balance your time?
K: I treat it as a job -- I go up there [a third-floor office space] at 8 and work till 3, until the kids [two sons, 12 and 9] come home. They do get annoyed with us talking about things we're writing.
S: Not so much. They're mostly interested in the weight of it. How many pages have you written?
K: How much money do you make every time someone buys a book?
S: They're basic American kids -- money, size.
K: Money and size, right.
S: Speed, they would be interested in.

Q: So I see that you bounce ideas off each other a lot?
K: Endlessly. Actually, I will take a story about as far as it can go and then come to Michael and say, "Here, I've got these characters and they're doing this, and they're in this situation, and I don't know what to do with them." Often he will say, "Why don't you try this and try that?" And then he'll read the final two versions and then after that I'm on my own.
S: I try not to let her read things until they're pretty much done or ready to leave the house. You don't get too many clean reads, so I try not to ask her until I reach a certain point.
K: You don't want to waste it on early stuff. You've got to pretty much have it down. And we both edit very carefully, line-edit each other's work.
S: I don't think we really care how the final version turns out.
K: You don't want to see it; you don't want to talk about it anymore. And you don't want to open it up and say, "I thought I told you to take this part out."

Q: Both of you have written in different voices than your own? Hester in a male voice? Michael in a black voice?
S: I used to be a black policeman.
K: Before he was a doctor/writer.

Q: What made you choose that voice, Michael?
S: I chose it out of friendship and not colonialism.

Q: But what made you believe that you could write in that voice?

Michael Stein

S: Here's the thing. I had an incident, a police shooting, that had provoked me for many, many years. And then I thought, "The typical police shooting is the one that set off the riots in Cincinnati -- a white cop shoots a black kid." So I said, "I'm gonna flip it over and let it be a black cop."
So I sort of saw it as partly story and partly a high challenge for me. I think people underestimate how much fiction is a technical challenge, as opposed to simply remembering or confession. And I guess I meant it as a provocation, that's there's so little white literature about black characters
K: I think you can't underestimate how important it is for a writer to be challenged. You have the standard very comfortable narrator, and there really is a way in which you have to create the life of this person fully and that's a terrific device in itself.
S: But it seemed to me so completely impractical what I was doing.
K: It is impractical.
S: So I just went ahead and did it.
K: It also tests in a very provocative way our idea about whose voice you're allowed to write in. I mean, it's barely pushing it to have a woman write as a man, but it's pushing it a lot more to have a white man write as a black man.
S: I'd love to hear from black people whether I did it. I don't know if I successfully did it or not. Or if I've made some major voice errors.
K: But there are errors of voice and then there are errors of consciousness, and one hopes that that transcends the black and white.
S: Hester and I talked about that. I thought about this a lot. Is there such a thing as a black voice or a black consciousness? Do you use certain words or an accent, that sort of thing? Is there such a thing as a woman's voice?
K: We don't know anything about anyone else's voice. Anything we know is fairly stereotypical, isn't it? You don't know what anybody's thinking.
S: I lent it to some black friends of mine before I put it out there. They didn't think it was unreasonable.

Q: Hester, you took a contemporary issue and gave it several twists. Did you expect it to go in those directions?
K: It came out of the characters' lives. A lot of this came out on a hidden level. Sometimes we're in a social situation with friends and everything's great. You get together with them regularly. And then something changes, and you don't really know what. And it's never the same again.
That's the idea here. The reason that happens is that you grow older, and things do change and you change. Then you have to re-configure and sometimes you come back together. It is a loss. I was interested in the idea that life doesn't really stay the same.

Q: And yet, you've said that you're a real optimist?
K: Yes. Someone recently said to me, "Maybe I've led a sheltered life, but your characters are so dysfunctional." It wasn't the first time that I've heard that, but I was really sort of taken aback. I know they are dysfunctional. Obviously it's exaggerated in the book because they're under this microscope. But people make a lot of mistakes with each other and they spend a lot of time trying to right things.

Q: You've also said that you're a nosy, voyeuristic person. Are you the kind of person who sits on a bus and watches people?
S: She would sit on a bus next to me, watch the people and then, as soon as the person got off, we would begin to make up a story about that person.
K: It makes everyone out there an interesting person. They have an amazing story or take on something.
S: The doctors who are happiest are the ones who understand that. And the doctors who are the unhappiest are the ones who don't understand that.
K: And who are not interested. Or curious.

Q: And who are probably not writers.

Two tomes

Michael Stein's The Lynching Tree (Permanent Press, 193 pages, $24) is a quick, breath-catching read, with far more mysteries to unravel than just the one which the title sets up: a white man hanged next to a golf course in fictional Pompan, New Jersey, a black-hooded mannequin at his feet. The first-person narrator, Donald ("Cage") Gambell, tells the story, in short, cinematic takes, remembering and reliving the 31 days of December that led up to a shooting incident on New Year's Eve between two policemen and a group of dark-capped youths.

Gambell lies in a hospital bed, recalling his first month on the job as Pompan's first black police officer, riding shotgun with six-year veteran Frank Butras, whose even-handedness as a cop is belied by his edginess over anything personal. Gambell also thinks back on moments with his college friends -- his Rutgers roommate Cedric, who loved to go fishing at dawn; his girlfriend Clarice, in med school in the city; Bob Esah, the white friend who originally showed him the clipping about the lynching in his hometown. And he lays out clear pictures of his family: the hard-bitten, self-righteous lawyer who is his father; his nosy, pushy and protective sister; his supportive and understanding mom, who died of cancer 14 months before; and her freewheeling brother, a Detroit detective whom Gambell takes as a role model.

As Gambell tries to piece together the puzzle, his mind can't avoid that climactic scene on New Year's Eve, and he returns to it, bit by agonizing bit, in more than 30 flashes interspersed throughout the book. Stein uses this technique to build suspense over who fired at whom in the police vs. skulking kids encounter and to underscore the question of why Gambell is in the hospital. Is he paralyzed? Semi-conscious? Flipped out? What did his father's treatment of him have to do with the driving force that brought him back to Pompan and pushed him to solve the lynching?

Stein's direct, spare prose gives The Lynching Tree the urgency of a police procedural at times -- "just the facts, ma'am." At other times, it evokes the choked-out phrases of self-revelation, the hit-over-the-head epiphanies that occur when a person taps into bone-deep instincts and walled-off emotions. Stein's lucid characterizations, his crisp dialogue and scene-sketches, and the provocative questions he raises about the violence lurking in the hearts of all humans give this compact novel a powerful wallop.

In her first novel, Kinship Theory (Little,Brown, 277 pages, $24.95), Hester Kaplan has chosen a situation -- surrogate motherhood -- and characters -- Maggie Crown, at 48, is having a baby for her daughter Dale -- that have all the potential for predictable plot development and hand-wringing, melodramatic scenes. But Kaplan's skill at getting inside her characters, at giving the reader the psychological nuances in the smallest of human interactions, and at filling each page with a lushness of sensory images keeps the plot turns surprising and the characters real.

Maggie works in an ophthalmology research lab for her old friend Ben; she toils for the grants, he gets the glory. Her marriage to Gordon had broken up nine years before, her close friendship with Ben's wife Doris is drifting, and she finds herself stuck in a rut of unfulfilled academic ambitions, free-floating loneliness, and a kind of benign neglect of herself. Deep down, she feels guilty about Dale's birth defect of having no uterus, and as she watches her daughter obsess over adoptions that fall through, she finally agrees to the surrogacy.

And that's just the bare bones of Kinship Theory. What Kaplan fleshes out with such incisive clarity are the shifting subtexts: the nagging worries Maggie has about Dale's distance from her, the cracks in Ben and Doris's marriage, and her intuitive sense that something isn't quite right with Dale's husband, Nate. Even as she gives us a compelling portrait of Maggie -- who tries to make sense of the changes in the people around her as much as the enormous changes taking place within her body -- Kaplan is passing along astute observations about marriage, parenting, birth, death, aging, self-awareness, and self-growth.

All of this is done in fluid prose that is drenched in startling metaphor. It can crop up in a small description, such as "an infant's mind was full of silvery shifts, like a school of minnows changing directions a hundred times a minute," or in a symbolic happening, like Maggie's rotting roof giving way and crashing down on her bed. Kaplan's way with words is simultaneously a way with deep insights about people's lives, as she crafts memorable images and molds thoughtful ideas into a very human, very readable story.
-- J.R.