He Wrote a Book About Interviewing. Here’s His Interview.

I want to be able to speak freely, and I want you to be able to speak freely, and in order to do that I think you should have more freedom than usual to take stuff off the record. My journalistic-ethics justification is that, because we know each other, I don’t want to take something that you told me privately and inadvertently drag it “on record,” if you want it to stay private.

You can ask me anything. I feel totally at ease. Sorry that I’m stupid. It could be the cumulative effects of COVID, I’ve decided. And cardiac bypass. And stupefaction of the far right.

And screens. You also have to blame the screens.

Yes, right, screens. I forgot about the screens.

O.K. So I’ll turn this on. [Turns on audio recorder.]

Has that recorder been used when you’ve been embedded with the far right? Am I getting the chance to share the hardware with the—

Yeah, this hardware has been enchanted by a multitude of voices.

[Laughs.]

Your new book, obviously, is about interviewing. When I read it, my first thought was, Poor Ben, he’s going to have to sit through a really annoying publicity tour where all these interviewers say, “I’m interviewing you about a book about interviewing—isn’t that clever?” Then, later, I thought, But if I were to interview Ben about his book about interviewing, that would be really clever.

What actually made me want to do this as a Q. & A., though, beyond the superficial pattern-matching, is that the interview scene in this book isn’t just used as a plot device. It’s also a way to explore some of the preoccupations that show up across all your novels. For example, the theme of superposition—put very simply, the idea that characters exist in a number of potential states simultaneously, some of them mutually exclusive, and this ambiguity or multiplicity doesn’t get resolved until some point in the future. Which is also a way to think about what we’re doing now: talking to each other in the present but in a way that only really makes sense if there’s an audience in the future. So I want to talk about what the interviewing does in the book, but, first, can you lay out its premise?

Well, what sets it in motion is that this middle-aged writer goes to Providence, where he went to college, to interview his ninety-year-old mentor, Thomas, who usually doesn’t give interviews. Thomas is ailing, and this is almost certainly going to be his last interview. When the writer gets there, though, he drops his cellphone—his only recording device—in the hotel sink. So he’s phoneless.

The narrator thinks he’ll go to Thomas’s house and say, “Look, this embarrassing thing happened.” But, when he gets there, he finds himself strangely unable to confess that he doesn’t have a way to record the interview. Then the interview happens, and Thomas is swinging between lucidity and senility, and a million things about their relationship come up, and the fiction records the interview the phone couldn’t capture. So the book starts with this interview that both does and doesn’t take place.

The book is very interested in questions about the role of technology versus the role of the artist. It’s also noticing how phones are distracting and enervating, which is, on its face, a very familiar observation.

Right. There wasn’t a book in me that was merely about showing how our attention is degraded by our phones. The book became writable when I thought of its project as partly about restoring our wonder before the weird fact of the disembodied voice that is made possible by different media, like voice mail and radio. I was interested in that séance-like, new-old, ancient-but-very-contemporary charging of the air around us. You’re right that there is a risk of being merely diagnostic when you write about things like cellphones. What fascinates me is the idea of making it seem like more of an ancient, dangerous human capacity to sever the voice from the body.

Getting together and talking is something we do, but we wouldn’t normally be talking in this register. Normally, it would be sort of ridiculous for me to say, “Ben, how did you discover this new voice?” But I can talk to you this way because of the future audience that we both have in mind.