Next week's Nashville Scene cover features a remarkable interview with novelist and Oscar-winning screenwriter John Irving, the subject of Nashville's first "Citywide Read." The 66-year-old author, whose works include The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Cider House Rules, will be here next week to accept the fifth Nashville Public Library Literary Award and to give a public reading at the Ryman Nov. 8. Asked by interviewer Michael Ray Taylor at one point if anything can be done to save literary fiction in the U.S., Irving gives a thoughtful, hilarious and wide-ranging response that touches on everything from presidential politics to the writer's role in the marketplace of ideas. Here's one juicy excerpt:
In Europe and in Canada, writers are expected to speak out politically—to be active in interviews, and everywhere in the media, in talking about more than their novels. It’s just the opposite here: writers are discouraged from expressing their opinions about politics or the society. We’re expected to talk about our books, a little, and then shut up about everything else. Why? Don’t creative minds have creative ideas? Look at this woeful election process we have been undergoing. There’s been more interesting and truthful stuff about the election on The Daily Show and on Saturday Night Live than what we’ve seen on the so-called news shows. We have become so politically correct that we must present a counter argument to every opinion expressed in the news. Why? Do we not trust people to have minds of their own? Does every issue have an equal counter argument? (Of course not!) What does it say about us as a culture that a couple of comedy shows on TV are smarter and more incisive, politically, than the back-and-forth meandering that passes for “in-depth coverage” on CNN or MSNBC? The bestseller list in the U.S. doesn’t only reflect what we read. That list is a reflection of how backward we are as a culture. We are anti-intellectual, we don’t value the arts, and we don’t sufficiently support education. President Bush made sounding stupid actually comforting to many Americans. Look at the rush of instant identification that many Americans felt for Governor Palin; she was mean, she was poorly informed, she spoke badly. I said to my wife, after watching Palin’s debate with Senator Biden, that I could only think of one question that woman might not duck—one she actually might answer, even with enthusiasm. Here’s the question. I have never field-dressed a moose, but—in my deer-hunting days—I have field-dressed deer, and I would have liked to ask the perky Alaskan if the process is more or less the same. (Only a lot bigger!) I could easily imagine Gov. Palin’s eyes brightening; an onslaught of pre-orgasmic winking might have ensued. “Ya know,” she might have begun, “ya just gotta make a big slit from the critter’s brisket to its crotch, and ya gotta reach way the heck up and grab hold of the rectum. Ya can’t let the feces fall out and get all over the meat, ya know. But there’s really nothin’ to it. It’s just a moose—it’s not a Russian, or somethin’!” I think that pretty much covers what the governor might say in answer to that question, except that she probably wouldn’t use the feces word—if ya know what I mean. In short, there’s more wrong with this country than we don’t read.
The interview appears on stands and online Wednesday. Photo by Jane Sobel Klonsky.
