Best-selling novelist, rock critic, and all-around candyfreak Steve Almond interviews experimental novelist Jennifer Natalya Fink about her extraordinary new novel, V. Almond and Fink explore the hefty literary questions of our time from the Christ complexes of Jewish teens to the turn-ons of female wooly monkeys. Sometimes they're not so different…

Author Photograph by Frances Sorensen

STEVE ALMOND: What inspired you to write such a peculiar—and peculiarly moving—novel? You mention a story your grandmother told, but how and why has this story haunted you?

JENNIFER NATALYA FINK: I was, as you put it, haunted by this story in large part because it was the only explanation given for what was a huge, strange mystery to me as child—why and how my family came to the United States from Brazil. As a kid in the '70s, growing up with assimilated, intellectual professor-slash-modern-dancer parents, most of my knowledge of Brazil as a kid came from Carmen Miranda movies. All I was told about my family's immigration was that we had come at some unspecified time from Lithuania to Sao Paulo, and left Brazil in trickles during the '40s-'60s under equally murky circumstances. I later learned that my family's seemingly bizarre migration was typical of many European Jews of that generation. Brazil had brought in large numbers of Jews from Eastern Europe between 1880-1920. Despite their largely successful assimilation, during the Catholic dictatorship of the notoriously anti-Semitic Getulio Vargas, Jews were kicked out of the country, forced to go undercover as Christians, or used by the government as pawns to oppress other minorities. But instead of explaining that complex and brutal history, I was told a bubbemeiser about a monkey, a gun, a hat, and man.

V is based on that bubbemeiser—which literally translates from Yiddish as a grandmother's tale, but really means something more like an old wives' tale, or a family myth. So this particular bubbemeiser is supposed to explain why my grandmother's family left São Paulo and ended up on the scenic suburban shores of Long Island, New York. And true to the spirit of the bubbemeiser, the story changes every time my grandmother tells it; however, it always involves a monkey, a gun, a hat, a man, and, implicitly, a girl. And of course the story explains absolutely nothing about why our family left Brazil.

I was also fascinated by the way my grandmother managed to make everything in the story—hat, gun, man, girl, monkey—seem equally alive, imbued with the idiosyncrasies and weird little details that make a character compelling. In my grandmother's telling, historical and philosophical questions were always mixed-up with the mundane, romantic, sexual, emotional, and "girly" aspects of life. This same sense of screwy mixed-upness permeates the world of V. So a monkey philosophizes, a man mourns, and the hat gets all the good lines.

SA: Do you yourself have a voice of loss inside your head? If so, how does it affect your writing?

JNF: I wish I didn't. I don't want to be all Debbie Downer, but I do find that there's just so much loss in adult life. By the time we hit thirty, we've lost our lovers, our looks, our sense of immortality. Literature is one of the few means through which we can simultaneously make sense of this loss, and experience its profound senselessness. In V, all of the characters—including God—have lost something they can't quite name. It's the thread that connects but also isolates them. I try to give voice to this unspeakable loss.

Of course that loss is always also historically and culturally specific, so I also tried to incorporate the kinds of losses going on for my Brazilian characters during the events of the story; for example, the monkey has lost her jungle due to the cutting down of the rainforests, and the human heroine, Veronica, has lost any sense of a coherent Jewish identity.

But the fascinating part of your question is the notion of a voice of loss. The woof and weave, the texture, the acoustics of loss—that's what I'm after in V. I think it's precisely these unbearable, unhearable losses that create (while paradoxically threatening to silence) voice—compel one to speak the unspeakable. Sound, silence, and loss are bound together in V, in the way the characters respond to the voice of God, which is the voice of their own superegos, the voice of loss, of desire. Sounds and silence offer us a different way into coping with (and celebrating) loss than words and images. So in a way, V is an acoustic novel: a story in sounds. And silences.

SA: I tend to make stories based on an emotional connection to my characters. I'm wondering, therefore, how you write from the point of view of an inanimate object. How do you discover the "voice" of a hat or a gun?

JNF: When I was a kid, I used to talk to (rather than smoke) the grass on my walk to school every day. So perhaps I have an easier time connecting with the inanimate world than your average, arguably better adjusted, bear. There's also a philosophical and even political dimension to imbuing everything with subjectivity; part of why we treat the environment like a toilet is that we deny it any sentience. In V, I'm exploring what it means to represent an expanded sense of subjectivity, of beingness. What it means to see your own consciousness as part of the natural, manufactured and human world around you.

This all sounds very New Agey, but in practice, getting into the head of a hat and gun was less touchy-feely and more freaky-deaky. It turns out that these inanimate objects have a lot to say about the people, and it's not so nice. Just like the human characters in the book, they experience a tension between empathy and alienation. Between identifying with the other (love) and projecting upon the other (hate). Each character does both. Including God.

SA: Was it a long-time fantasy for you to write from God's perspective?

JNF: Hell yes! I am obsessed with God as only an atheistic Jewish girl can be. In V, it was great fun to really explore God's character—to create a backstory explaining his insecurities, to give him an inner voice, to think about who he would worship. It helped to demystify God, and the human need for him (and perhaps vice versa). If you read the Bible—Old Testament or New—you can't help but be struck by what an insecure, bullying bastard God is. He's the stalker boyfriend who calls you up at 4 a.m. to tell you that he's totally over you. God seems to be in denial about his need for man, and he has no idea how to talk to girls. His son is a mess. He's just trying to impress his old man with all the walking-on-water, self-mutilating, messiah-complex crap.

Complicating this is the fact that in V, God's and Veronica's perspectives overlap and collide. I placed Veronica in the middle of two creation myths—the Jewish one and the Catholic one. Veronica finds that she's simply not in these great stories of creation; women generally aren't—not as their subjects, at least. So she creates her own. I think teenage girls do this all the time; hence their fascination with witchcraft, and their peculiar fusing of the magic of the body with the magic of language. It's a way of negotiating their ascending sexual and descending cultural power. Veronica is a holy anorexic: she doesn't want to be thin to be pretty, but to be God. And, in a way, she is.

SA: In reading your prose, I was reminded variously of Cortazar, Borges, and the short fiction of J.F. Powers. Who are your influences?

JNF: As for literary influences, the writers you mention are all certainly there. The magical realism and Latin American sense of the absurd of Cortazar, Marquez and Borges helped me find a way into the inanimate characters and theological dimensions of the story, as did the phenomenal Brazilian-Jewish writer Clarice Lispecter, who invented her own genre that blends political concerns with a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of Woolf. I think I share Haruki Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicle's sense of the fabulistic dimensions of 20th century history—how it's all so weird, so unlikely, so unnatural that the only way you can tell the story of, say, globalization is through the mythopoetic techniques of magical realism. And the poet Elizabeth Bishop is in the mix, in the language and its insistent embrace of both irony and lyricism as well as her intimacy and distance from Brazil.

The other kind of influence is far more difficult to pin down. It's all the material I encountered—visual, scientific, and theological—that somehow entered the universe of the novel. In the case of V, it included everything from field studies on the mating habits of wooly monkeys, this brilliant little book on "holy anorexics" by Robert Bell about women who starved themselves in order to be Jesus; the arresting photographs of the late Francesca Woodman, whose women become buildings, landscapes, dresses. It's all the phrases, fragments, and images that somehow enter the world of the book. This includes those culled from my manic outbreaks of research—what kind of hats would a Jewish industrialist in Brazil wear in 1953? What is considered sexy to a wooly monkey?

I suspect my deepest influences are unnamable; they're either the random bits of flotsam and jetsam of daily life, or else so deeply charged that I could never consciously admit to them. So yeah, influence is an odd, flighty bird.

I hope that the book also leaves room for the reader to fully enter it, bringing his or her own influences, ideas, associations, memories, fears, hats, guns, men, monkeys. And girls.