Kurt Andersen discusses the novel as an intellectual undertaking. He talks about the joy he finds creating his own world.

Kurt Andersen: For fiction, the pleasure, the joy, is being god of my own little world. And creating this world and these characters. In this latest book, in the middle of the 19th Century. As other fiction writers have said, they take on their own life and surprise one – the author – by doing things you didn’t expect. Still you are god. And so that’s hugely fun.

And since I’m relatively a new writer and I’ve dabbled in fiction before the last 11 years, but I’ve only been publishing, and I still feel like, as I expect to feel for the rest of my life, that I’m still figuring it out. So that the joy, if not mastering, at least having good moments of figuring out how to do this thing that again.

Because of my childhood and my parents sort of worship of fiction – great novels – I feel as though, you know, it’s if not the highest, best calling, at least one of them. And when I feel as though I’ve gotten a line right, or a character, or a paragraph, or a chapter; I was going to say it’s all struggle in what I do. But there’s very little struggle in what I do on the radio. It is a kind of unfairly pleasurable experience because the people I work with do most of the heavy lifting, and I just get to talk to brilliant people.

But any kind of writing – non-fiction or fiction – is a struggle. It’s a very moment-to-moment struggle of figuring where the right sentence, the right paragraph, the right page, the right structure for the larger thing. And when you’re writing a book – my two novels have been 600 odd pages – that becomes an enormous structure to try to get as right as possible. It’s a pleasurable struggle when you’re done; but it is a struggle while it’s going on.

I actually find the work of writing fiction less of a struggle, less of a stressful procedure than I do writing a 1,700 word essay. The essay, or journalism really is almost pure struggle. And then I’m only happy when I’m done. Whereas writing fiction has moments of pleasure amid the struggle while it’s going on.

I like to think that the tens of thousands of people who are reading this novel that I’ve written about the middle of the 19th Century will actually have their brains permanently re-wired to think about the middle of the 19th Century in a different way as a result of having read this book. To the degree that that’s true, that’s a hugely gratifying, albeit small, impact.

Recorded On: July 5, 2007