DH: Kate, in my first post on your new novel, The Astral, I said that the most important subject in fiction is marriage. That’s my take anyway. Mixing up Tolstoy’s statement a bit, if the marriage is happy, then there’s no story. I can think of two extreme ways of looking at marriage in fiction: One is just functional, that the writer needs to tell a story and examining a marriage is a convenient structure on which to hang your narrative. The other extreme is that marriage is the most intimate expression of what it is to be human.

Why is the subject of marriage important? And why did you want to portray the breakup of one? Why is it interesting?

KC: The qualities in the kind of novel I’ve always found most interesting and memorable are interpersonal drama, trouble, tension, mischief, and/or emotional duress. For me, the key word is “interpersonal.” Unless the novel in question is a murder mystery, science fiction novel, or some other genre requiring traditional external plot machinations, an overly contrived or clever or unwieldy plot just gets on my nerves and detracts from what I find most important in a story: how are the people getting along? How do they feel about one another? What sorts of mistakes are they making, and what are the consequences?

Therefore, marriage and sex, friendship, and social goings-on are my favorite novelistic subjects (novels about parenthood and childhood interest me far less, if at all). Marriage is particularly high-stakes and intense — no two marriages are exactly alike, and not even one marriage is the same thing from year to year. Marriage is a mutable, infinitely faceted animal. When a writer dives straight into its dark, murky, dazzling, dangerous depths, it can be as thrilling to read about as a climb up Everest or a voyage to outer space.

Marriage as plot device is superficially limited but intrinsically riveting. It’s a story with two basic possible endings: the couple either stays together, or they split up. The same way bystanders in real life find themselves invested in, judgmental of, and involved with the breakup of a couple they know well, readers tend to invest themselves in fictional characters’ lawful unions and project their own hopes, beliefs, fears, and desires onto their travails, and to react strongly to either outcome.

I paced and structured The Astral according to the rhythms and atmosphere of a classic detective novel: Love is dead — who killed it? Harry is the chief suspect determined to prove his own innocence, the by-default detective bent on finding the answer. Clues accrue through the novel as he talks to anyone who might help him. And – as in a “crimmey,” as my grandmother called them – the novel ends when all the facts have come to light.

DH: In your wonderful earlier novel, The Great Man, you focus on several contrasting women. There are some male characters but they are peripheral. The women characters are bracketed by the offstage “great man”, a famous contemporary artist now deceased. Your last novel, Trouble, focused on a friendship between two women.

But as I got into The Astral, I thought: My gosh, Kate’s made the central character a man…and Harry Quirk is on virtually every page of The Astral. It an amazing concentration on one character.

Harry is our Brooklyn hero in your story. What do you think of him? Maybe imagine that you ran into your own character in Greenpoint. What would he look like to you?

KC: Harry looks like any one of the energetically shambling, slightly down-at-heels men of a certain age who walk the Greenpoint streets looking solitary and full of stories; during all the years I lived there, they sparked my imagination. Their lives seemed so different from mine; they seemed to belong to an altogether different (earlier) era. I would walk by such a man and wonder: what is his story? Where does he live? Where is he going?

For many years, I lived around the corner from the legendary, sprawling Astral Apartments. I always vowed to write a novel about the place. Harry sprang into my imagination straight from my ideas about the Astral (I’ve never set foot in the building) – he’s a guy who’s been kicked out of that big red ghetto-castle pile and yearns to go back. He could only exist in a certain kind of place.

DH: Your novel takes place in Brooklyn. It is Brooklyn. What is Brooklyn? Tell me about the place. What do you like about it? And the sections of Brooklyn that are the stage for The Astral: Greenpoint, Crown Heights, and Red Hook. Are those your favorite Brooklyn neighborhoods, or did you choose them for your story for some other reason?

KC:Harry is a manifestation of Greenpoint, a neighborhood where it’s simultaneously 1876, 1933, 1958, and 1974, and where even the present feels sepia and eternal. The streets are full of grit and sediment from the lives of the people who’ve lived there, their workaday stories, bar fights, petty crimes, marital turmoil, moments of wonderment and beauty and so forth – and it would be easy to sentimentalize the place if it hadn’t stayed so much the same through the decades. Nothing has been lost. Even with the current colonizing influx of so-called “hipsters,” the streets absorb and transform them without losing anything. I was transformed by the neighborhood, myself. Greenpoint’s very powerful that way.

I first moved to north Brooklyn in 1990. I lived in Williamsburg and Greenpoint until two years ago. I wrote the book as a kind of farewell to a place I both loved and hated, a neighborhood I was intensely involved in for many years – because of this, an elegiacal nostalgia pervaded the writing of the book for me. My own marriage of twelve years had ended just before I began the book; I’d recently left the neighborhood where I’d lived, on and off, for twenty years, which was most of my adult life. The novel is, among other things, a metaphor for an era in my own life.

I wrote about north Brooklyn — Bushwick, Red Hook, Crown Heights, the southside of Williamsburg, and Greenpoint — from visceral, clear, deeply familiar memory, a sense of loss and finality: that part of my life is over. The Astral is a sort of oblique record of a time and place in my life, although it’s not directly about me or my own experiences.

DH: Once and for all, I want to get to the point of your take on friendship. You happen to take friendship farther in your stories than any other writer I know. In your novel Trouble, you put two women friends in bed together as one of the friends consoles the other who is going through a hard time. But I’m convinced there’s nothing sexual about this scene. Sensual maybe, but it’s not intended to be erotic.

In The Astral, Harry has a best friend, Marion, who he appears to like better, and is more compatible with, than his wife, Luz. Yet it’s clear from the text that he loves Luz, not Marion.

How far can friendship go? What is it capable of?

KC: If I knew, I wouldn’t need to write about it, so in a way, I’m glad I don’t — maybe there is no real answer. It’s a question I’ve always asked myself, or rather, a series of questions. What do we owe our friends, what do they owe us? What are the rules? Friendship is very different from marriage, no matter the occasional superficial similarities. There’s no legally binding commitment, no intertwining of two people’s finances, belongings, and families. There’s no adultery or divorce. There’s no expected or promised monogamy. We can go weeks without seeing our friends and reunite as if no time had gone by; this is generally not the case with spouses, to put it mildly.

But friendship is a peculiar animal – like marriages, no two are alike. Sometimes a friendship runs its course, and its end comes as a relief. But the end can also be as heartbreaking and devastating as a romantic breakup. Friendships can be as intensely passionate, turbulent, and complicated as love affairs, and the sense of shared history, trust, and love in a lifelong friendship is as sustaining and important as marriage. And two friends’ mutual delight in each other’s company can sometimes even surpass the feelings between spouses, which can become muddy and dulled over time, with the familiarity of daily life, the boredom and tension of monogamy and cohabitation. Friends are almost always excited to see each other; spouses often aren’t.

Hence Harry’s happiness at a night out with his friend Marion…a platonic friendship between a man and a woman, especially when one or both are married, is generally and specifically complicated. There don’t seem to be any ground rules; it’s generally understood that if a spouse feels threatened, then the friendship has to be throttled back or ended, but I’m not sure that’s entirely fair or warranted. What I do know is that it’s rich with dramatic potential, the spouse-friend-spouse triangle, and it’s a lot of fun to write about.

DH: Your last two novels, I’m counting The Astral, have featured interesting roles for psychotherapists. Therapy casts your characters into a fog. Your engaging characters, for whom we have so much sympathy, seem to be floundering around like we all are. But the shrinks operate in a higher atmosphere, above the fog line.

Doesn’t a writer have that role with her characters? In The Astral, we’re absorbed with the befuddlement of Luz and Harry about their marriage. But you’re the writer. You have a clear head about your characters’ dilemmas, don’t you? It’s like, as the writer, you’re the therapist of your characters. So, is a novelist like a therapist towards her own fictional creations or not?

KC: The job of a therapist is to treat her clients’ confidences with seriousness, compassion, finely honed curative techniques, utter confidentiality, and clinical dispassion. The novelist, on the other hand, appropriates and broadcasts her characters’ tender feelings, traumatic memories, embarrassing behavior, and humiliating dilemmas far and wide to anyone who cares to listen, often with humor, irony, and downright glee. A therapist is supposed to be a conduit to change and healing and growth; a novelist is a troublemaker and a gossip.

Writing about Harry and Luz, I was as salaciously interested in gossiping about their troubles to the reader (in Harry’s voice, but even so) as any local busybody on a barstool. I had very little idea what would happen once I had set them in motion, and I was surprised by the ending; it wasn’t the one I had expected or foreseen when I began the novel.

DH: Your forthcoming novel, The Astral, had two features which I greatly admired and for some reason, I’m associating them with each other. One is the depiction economic hardship. Your characters are living in tough times. If you had written The Astral 15 years ago, maybe you would be depicting characters who are flush. And I noticed that several of your hard-pressed characters end up working for very wealthy people, like there’s no middle class anymore, just the wealthy and their staffs.

The other feature that I keep thinking about is the sadness of belief. Both Luz and Harry have crazy beliefs about their marriage. And the remarkable Hector, who leads a religious cult, does so by faking miracles. But his motives are benign, that’s the amazing part. The “love bombing” that reinforces Hector’s cult also seems like a kind of false belief. The false opposite of the true friendship that you so admirably depict in your literature.

Harry Quirk ends up as a tragic hero by the end of The Astral and I love him for it. But what is the truth about all this false believing, this lying to people for their own good? Is it that economic hardship makes escapism more appealing? What do you want your characters to believe in, if anything?

KC: Harry calls himself a “fundamentalist atheist.” At the beginning, he’s adamantly and vehemently sure that empirical experience is the only reality. He looks feels superior to Luz’s devout traditional Catholicism and other poets’ flights into religious speculation or ecstasy. But, as the novel goes on, it gradually dawns on him that adamantly espousing the nonexistence of God, eschewing any leap – of faith, belief, or religious transcendence – might in its way be as limiting and constricting as rote adherence to dogma. As he expands out of the repressions required by his marriage into a fuller life, his atheism begins to feel like an organizing principle, a crutch, that has kept him from the fullest expression of his humanity and poetic potential. As he flounders around, his carefully crafted formal poetry disintegrates into free verse and runs aground; his displacement drives him outward, into the streets. He loses his way as a man and a poet, and it’s good for him in the end.

Cult mind control is another story entirely. The leaders of Hector’s group, the Children of Hashem, manipulate and lie to the followers, keep them compliant through controlling techniques that were also useful to fascist governments: sleep deprivation, loss of privacy and autonomy, pressure to report dissenters to the people in charge, and a superabundance of belief-reinforcing meetings, to name a few. It’s not a genuinely held belief so much as coerced compliance in the interests of money, power, and control.

The connection between religion and economic status is a complex one; it wasn’t something I addressed consciously in the novel. My ideas and observations about the socioeconomic divides in New York City are generally separate from my thinking about belief, religion, and atheism; the truism is that poor people need faith to get by, but I haven’t observed that poor people are any more or less religious in than rich ones.

I have experienced, in a great variety of ways and settings, the gamut, or maybe the word I want is spectrum, between the wildly rich and the struggling poor. New York is a place of strivers and achievers and scrappy go-getters of every nationality and religion. Some people have, and others want. This gulf is fascinating to me – the proximity of the rich to the poor, the lack of insulation in the city from any one class, the great sense of extremes of wealth and poverty from block to block or even within one building. It’s an extraordinarily rich environment for a novelist, especially in terms of teasing out the implications in relationships between people with very different financial situations – who has the power, how this upsets or determines the balance between them.

These disparities are everywhere in The Astral: Harry is broke and down on his luck; his old friend James is a self-made millionaire who runs his own business; Marion isn’t rich, but she owns her house and always has food in her refrigerator and whiskey on her counter; Luz works hard, makes a good living as a nurse, loses her job, and finds another one; Karina is a freegan who Dumpster dives but has a car and owns a house with a paying tenant; Hector joins a group who live in a Sag Harbor mansion but try to live a simple, self-sustaining lifestyle while their leader shops at Anthropologie; and so forth.

This is a classic New York scenario: even within groups of friends, within families, there are great differences. It’s not a question of class, but of how successful you are at the collective, citywide striving game, a game everyone acknowledges, respects, and plays to win.

Harry finds himself, as the novel opens, 57 years old, suddenly without a wife or a home or a poetry career, just scrambling to get by from day to day. He’s opted out, or maybe he’s been pushed out, of his participation in the great New York dream – now – rather than fame or riches, he’s just glad to have a bed to call his own, the ongoing respect of his daughter, a date with a woman he’s just met, a rather menial job in Accounts Payable, and his old friends.

The Astral is in part about the necessary, rueful, and ultimately satisfying acceptance of your own limitations as you get older, the diminishment and rejiggering of identity to reflect reality after a certain point. It’s about the end of youth.

DH’s reviews of Kate Christensen’s The Astral:

Part 1

Part2

Part 3