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Looks Joshilyn Jackson Kevin Guilfoile Stephanie Doyon |
Elizabeth Gaffney: Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here. Rochelle Krich: Your novel, Metropolis, has received glowing reviews. Can you tell our readers something about it? Elizabeth Gaffney: I like to think of it as a big sprawling romp through NY history, a book that tries to be a lot of things at once: first of all, the coming of age story of two characters (Frank and Beatrice) and of the city of New York itself; then also a love story; and finally a crime story. Rochelle Krich: Metropolis has been called "a rambunctious literary novel," "a colorful melodrama," "an engrossing fable," "a compulsively readable historical novel." I agree with all of those definitions. How would you define your novel? Elizabeth Gaffney: Thanks. I'm pretty happy with all those descriptions. As I said, I want it to be a lot of different kinds of book in one. Life is always more complicated than a novel, but I wanted there to be a sense of that overwhelming swirl of life in the book. For me, there is room for both melodrama and literature between the same two covers. But I guess if I had to sum it up it would be a coming of age story. Because it's not just the two immigrant main characters who grow up -- it's the city itself, which is in a sort of adolescent phase in the 1870, right on the verge of becoming the metropolis we all know today. Rochelle Krich: I definitely felt the swirl. And your comment brings me to my next question. The novel begins in 1868, and you make several references to the fact that the Civil War ended not long before. Why did you select 1868? Why not earlier or later? Elizabeth Gaffney: I very consciously decided not to include the war period in the book. That is such a big subject, and while I wanted to include a lot of the world, I could fit something as huge as the war into the story I was thinking about. The civil war is an awfully popular topic, and it's been written about so well. There are a lot of war books I love, but I wasn't ready to take on that material. And then there's the fact that I wanted to write toward the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, which was first started in 1868 (and finished in 1883), so I didn't want to start too early. My character Harris doesn't work on the bridge from he beginning of the novel -- he has to work his way up to that -- but I felt it was his destiny, and so the book started at that time. One last factor was that in 1868 the city of NY began a major sewer rebuilding and expansion project, and I wanted to include the underbelly of the city in the book, too. Rochelle Krich: I found your description of the sewers intriguing. The Brooklyn Bridge strikes me as a metaphor for the aspirations that all immigrants share. Would you agree? Elizabeth Gaffney: Yes, I think that's just right. I hope it isn't too obvious -- a soaring bridge, the highest structure in the world at the time, being such a symbol, but sometimes things are that simple. The bridge was designed by immigrants -- the Roebling family -- and built by them -- the mostly Irish laborers who did the grunt work. It also changed the way NY worked, greatly expanding the city's boundaries and leading the to the merger of Manhattan and Brooklyn. But back to the sewers. They are one of the big but hidden infrastructure projects that enabled the city to survive on the scale it was growing to -- about a million inhabitants by 1870, if you can believe it. Rochelle Krich: Hard to believe. And as to your question--no, your metaphor isn't too obvious. I think it's the perfect metaphor--the bridge evokes the thrill, the hopes, the danger. Metropolis, like the city at its heart, is a sprawling work. How long did it take you to write it? Elizabeth Gaffney: I spent about 7 years on it. I never meant to take so long, but I was working other jobs, and at one point when I thought I was almost finished, I was derailed for a whole year by my father's unexpected death. That actually changed the book a lot. When I finally got back to working on it again, I felt I had a lot more insight into the characters and how the story should go. Rochelle Krich: I was moved by the relationship--or rather, the broken relationship--between Frank and his father, the mourning he feels for the father he "lost." Was that colored by your father's death? Elizabeth Gaffney: It was. In fact there are a lot of characters who lose their parents in the book, some of them quite early, and they all handle it differently. Several of the lead male characters, including Harris and the two villains, Undertoe and Johnny Dolan, all grow up without fathers, either... Rochelle Krich: And Maria, and Beatrice.... Elizabeth Gaffney: ... because of death or some sort of abandonment. In Undertoe's case, that's part of what makes him a psychopath and is his "excuse" for being so evil. For Harris, it steels his revolve. And the women too, yes ... I was talking to someone about the familiar trope of kids being orphaned in children's books -- think of Harry Potter, or Lemony Snicket's Baudelaire kids or Phillip Pullman's Lyra in His Dark Materials or any number of other classic books. Or Oliver Twist, say. I guess losing parents is part of coming of age, whether it's just a metaphor for growing up and moving on or it's through death. With Beatrice and Maria, they both loose their parents early too, and it's an ordeal -- it turns them both toward crime in order to survive. Actually, Beatrice is a worse criminal than Maria, who is just a prostitute, and doesn’t rob or hurt anyone... Rmkrich: ... and isn't aware that she's spreading disease.... Elizabeth Gaffney: ... but yet she has totally lost her sense of self and her dignity, while Beatrice still has goals and dreams and aspirations to improve herself, to overcome, not just survive. Rochelle Krich: And she has that "eye gouger." That image is haunting, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Gaffney: Yes, I don't think we can blame Maria for spreading typhoid – I meant her to be a Typhoid Mary figure, though. The real Typhoid Mary lived later. Glad you like the eye gouger. When I came across that as a weapon, it just seemed so awful, I had to include it in the book. Rochelle Krich: What was the most challenging aspect of writing the novel? Elizabeth Gaffney: I would say the most challenging aspect of writing was editing down all the sprawl. I probably cut hundreds of pages, including major plot lines and various subplots that I still think of as being part of the book, just a hidden, or unpublished part. Rochelle Krich: I was going to ask you about that. You paint a fascinating, intimate, detailed portrait of life in Manhattan, and you tell the reader at the end of the book some of the resource materials you used. How did you decide what to include in the novel, and what to leave out? Elizabeth Gaffney: For a while, Harris had a whole love affair with the lady doctor, Sarah Blacksall. Rochelle Krich: She was willing... Elizabeth Gaffney: Well, I wanted to keep the story moving, and I realized that people might get frustrated. There are certain tempos that you establish and should maintain, more or less, to keep the reader satisfied. Rochelle Krich: If not Sarah... Elizabeth Gaffney: About SB, yes, she was in love with him for a while, but he only sort of admired her, and it wasn't enough I also did a lesbian affair between Blacksall and Smith! But Smith was real figure, and I thought that might not be ok, since I had no evidence of such a thing (she was married twice.) Do you want to hear about the women's medical college? Rochelle Krich: Absolutely. Elizabeth Gaffney: It was founded in 1868, and trained black and white women side by side! The first class graduated in 1870. They dissected cadavers in gross anatomy lab just like regular med school. Susan Smith was in the first class of graduates. I couldn't believe it, when I came across this information, that I had never heard of such a thing. They were really pretty radical. But obviously, it didn't become part of the mainstream culture. Rochelle Krich: Obviously. Sadly... Elizabeth Gaffney: We haven't come all that far, for all the feminist movement has tried to do. Rochelle Krich: You're quoted as saying that you're obsessed with New York. When did this obsession begin? What aspects of New York do you find particularly compelling? Elizabeth Gaffney: I guess it's just that I've always lived here (except for going off to college and living in Germany for a while after college). My personality is one of being an observer, a watcher of the world. So I have always been interested in what I see on the streets of my home town. There's so much going on here. It feels like a microcosm of the entire world to me, since it's such a immigrant center, even today. Rochelle Krich: What surprised you the most about New York in the 1860's? What dismayed you most? Elizabeth Gaffney: I was surprised by how densely populated it was – considering how small the area people inhabited then (near Central park, there were mostly vast empty fields that had been cleared and were waiting to be developed) , it was practically as dense as it is now. The descriptions of how loud and crowded and dangerous it was to cross Broadway are just amazing. I supposed I was most dismayed by how little things have changed from then to now. We still have such outrageous social inequities, such racial discrimination. Certain diseases still seem to hit the under classes hardest, despite all our modern medicine and social reforms. Rochelle Krich: And crime.... Do you think the nature of crime and criminals in New York has changed? Elizabeth Gaffney: The gangs that were quite powerful back then were quite different from the ones nowadays, the Mafia and the Chinese gangs and the bloods and crips. But it's interesting that we do still see the criminal underclass organizing itself into groups in this way. There was a great deal of corruption back then. Then again, I think there still is today. Maybe street violence is less, but I'm not so sure about in the 70's, when I was growing up. The streets were scary then. I think the presence of the gangs and the crime aspect in my story arises largely from my sense as a kid that there was potential danger lurking behind every corner, parked car, down every dark alley. Rochelle Krich: I grew up in New York and I'd have to agree. Elizabeth, I love the hypertext map of New York in 1870-- http://www.elizabethgaffney.net/map.html . Was that your idea or your editor's? Elizabeth Gaffney: Thanks! I am sort of proud of it, though it's not quite finished, since I made it myself. It was totally my idea. I had so much research material that I just couldn't include in the story. I was so interested in some of the true stories and facts I came across, that I felt the urge to make them public somehow. Things like the Women's medical college just seemed to need some documentation to me, so I put the pictures and info I found online. Rochelle Krich: The information and photos are fascinating. I'm sure our readers will appreciate the extra information. You're an advisory editor of The Paris Review, and you've written short fiction that has been appeared in highly acclaimed publications. What made you decide to write a novel? Elizabeth Gaffney: For a long time I was casting about for an idea for a longer work and I was thinking of writing a book more similar to my stories-- meaning contemporary, about someone a lot more similar to myself than any of the characters in Metropolis, but I found I just wasn't excited about sustaining that kind of story. Maybe I don't have enough insight into my own times, or that's how I felt. I made a conscious choice to move away from my own world and time and even gender, by picking Frank Harris as a protagonist. That was a lot of fun, and it gave me a lot of pleasure to be able to do research and to freely invent things, rather than feel I was documenting something I already knew well. It kept my interest, so I hoped it would keep my readers' interest, too. Rochelle Krich:It kept mine. Elizabeth, authors often talk about "writer's remorse." Is there anything you wish you'd included? Elizabeth Gaffney: Well, I wish I had found a way to make the story of John Henry a little bigger -- he's the black demolition expert who becomes Harris's best friend. And I wish I could have included even more parts of the city at that time. Someone asked me about Jewish immigrants, and I regret that I didn't add a few more references to that part of the social fabric. It's in there subtly -- got cut way down from one of those major subplots I had to get rid of for pacing purposes, but Harris's mother was Jewish. Rochelle Krich: I was intrigued by that, too. You've translated several works from German to English. Did that shape your choice of protagonist? Elizabeth Gaffney: Yes, very much so. MY own ethnic background is not German, but I know Germany better than I do Ireland, so that became Harris's place of origin. The Germans and Irish were the two largest immigrant groups in NY at the time the book is set. Rochelle Krich: Do you see yourself writing another novel about New York? Another borough? Another time period? What's next? Elizabeth Gaffney: I am working on the next one now, and it's also going to be set in NY. Probably more in Brooklyn, where I grew up, and in the period between the end of WWII and Vietnam. It's called the War Effort, and it's in large part about the wars that happen on the home front, when the nation is at war. Also, there's going to be some attention to way in which the country understands itself to be waging a "good" war or a bad "war". That said, it's the story of a family, or maybe two families, really -- one white, and one black, who are connected because the black mother works as a servant he white family's house; then the two kids grow up and fall in love. A lot else happens, I don't know it all yet. Rochelle Krich: I'm assuming your editor isn't giving you seven years to finish the novel. When will it be out? Elizabeth Gaffney: Oh yeah, I could ad that the other war at this time is conflict going on between black and white and liberal and conservative parts of society during the civil rights movement. I have two years to write it. I think I may be able to pull it off, as I have quit all my jobs but then again I'm about to have a baby, so I'll have to figure out how to reinvent my work schedule as a mother. Rochelle Krich: Good luck with the book and the baby! And finally--where can readers reach you, Elizabeth? Elizabeth Gaffney: Thank you. They can check out my website at http://www.elizabethgaffney.net or email me at eliz@elizabethgaffney.net. This was really fun. Thank you for your great questions Rochelle. Rochelle Krich: Thanks! And thanks again for chatting with us at ReadersRoom. |