Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd, Soul Sand.

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Jo Reed: That's author and playwright Victor Lodato. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I'm Josephine Reed. Victor Lodato is an award-winning playwright whose first novel, Matilda Savitch, won the PEN USA Award for Fiction. Lodato’s second novel, Edgar and Lucy, was almost ten years in the making, and was published to great critical acclaim. Edgar and Lucy is an epic—part family-drama, part ghost story, part love story—all of it moving, compelling, believable, yet unexpected. It really is a marvel of a book with its rich characters and deep attention to language. Lodato has written some 13 plays and he received early support from the National Endowment for the Arts—one of the many fellowships he has been awarded during his career. His years in the theater served him well when he added novels to his repertoire—his pacing and understanding of drama, as well as an uncanny knack for dialogue, are evident throughout this complicated story. In fact, the story itself of Edgar and Lucy defied my ability to describe it succinctly, so I asked the author Victor Lodato for a thumbnail sketch of the book…..

Victor Lodato: Okay. It’s such a sprawling book that it’s hard to do the thumbnail but—

Jo Reed: I know. That’s why I asked you as opposed to me trying.

Victor Lodato: <laughs> So basically it is the story of the fates of two characters, Edgar and Lucy, mother and son, over the course of their lifetime, mainly focusing on one particularly difficult year in their life when Edgar’s eight. The book projects even into their futures and into Lucy’s past, but it’s really about this one year in their life, and—and probably in describing the book I often joke about the book and call it my “New Jersey gothic” but I do think that it’s a true contemporary gothic in many ways, which I can speak more of if you want to talk about that.

Jo Reed: That’s exactly where I do want to go because that was my second question of—you’ve described it as “New Jersey gothic” so, tell us, tell me what you mean by this.

Victor Lodato: Well, you know I first thought of that sort of just as, you know, a silly thing to say about the book but the more I thought about it the more I do consider it a true gothic in that it’s very much about Edgar and Lucy’s complicated relationship to the past and then there’s also a sense of this past as having a malignant influence, and then all of this is happening in sort of an updated version of the ruined castle of gothic literature. At first it’s the sort of dilapidated suburban house that Edgar and Lucy live in and then in the second half of the book it’s the underworld of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, which is a very strange and haunted place. And I think when I recognized that the book was a gothic, it gave me permission to go for sort of a bigger and hotter emotional temperature than what I am used to writing.

Jo Reed: The characters themselves are just so extraordinary. They all grow in stature for me from the major ones to the supporting ones with one exception and I think that’s quite unusual. I’d like to talk about the characteristics, personality, of Edgar, who is so unusual in many ways, both physically, but emotionally and intellectually as well.

Victor Lodato: Yeah, do you want me to ramble on that now a little bit?

Jo Reed: Yeah, ramble away.

Victor Lodato: <laughs> Yeah, you know people have talked about the peculiarities of some of the characters, you know Edgar, and then of course Edgar’s father who we learn had struggles with mental illness, and then when I’m writing the book I’m never thinking about writing about Edgar as a child who is considered maybe Asperger’s or on some sort of borderline autism scale and father Frank as schizophrenic; I’m really sort of just really trying to understand their personalities. And I don’t even think I ever mention schizophrenia in regard to Frank and maybe there’s just a glancing reference of autism in terms to Edgar but, I’m really—I think people are in—generally a lot odder than we often see in fiction and I just—I think I’m fairly an odd person myself; I think most people are fairly odd. And I really tried to look at the strangeness of personalities and the strangeness of sort of our condition.

Jo Reed: Yeah, and with Edgar the thing that struck me about him is how kind he is and his ability to love and also his ability to receive love.

Victor Lodato: Oh, well, I’m glad. You know, that was sort of the breakthrough for me in writing the book. I mean in some ways, the book has a lot of comic elements but it’s a very hard book. The family goes through some very serious and dangerous and upsetting trials and I think it was the character of Edgar that sort of helped me through that and get through the darkest parts of the novel because there are many heroes in the novel. I mean Edgar and Lucy are both of equal importance in, in some ways in the novel but Edgar in some ways I recognized him as my true hero and it’s exactly what you’re talking about. His power isn’t great strength, or even overt bravery, but he does have this uncanny ability to love ferociously, and even more so to offer kindness in very unlikely situations to people who we wouldn’t think as readers or even me as the writer think, do they deserve him being this kind? And so I was just really attracted to that in him and that’s what kept me writing because kindness seems like a small thing but I think it’s a—it’s huge, and the more I wrote this book I realized why is it as rare? Shouldn’t we see kindness constantly because it’s so simple to offer? And so Edgar’s character was a revelation to me about life and also as I said in just—in understanding the nature of this book.

Jo Reed: He would take my breath away at moments; I would have to stop for a second and just pause; it was so moving. Florence, who I really feel we need to talk about is Edgar’s beloved grandmother, and that character is so key to Edgar, and as we learn, to Lucy as well.

Victor Lodato: Uh huh. This book, even though I grew up in New Jersey and grew up in sort of a working-class Italian-Polish family similar to the family in this book, the story is completely, if not largely, invented. But the dynamics between the characters, some of the emotional dynamics, are definitely drawn from my own family and my childhood, and particularly the character of Florence. I had the great fortune of growing up in a house with both my grandmothers, my Italian grandmother and my Polish grandmother, and my parents worked a lot; they were often absent and so it was these two women who raised me. And so the character of Florence, the grandmother in the book, is basically taking my two grandmothers—taking my very tiny Polish grandmother and stuffing her up inside the body of my much larger Italian grandmother and making them one person.

Jo Reed: Well you did a great job with it.

Victor Lodato: Thank you.

Jo Reed: Why don’t we hear a little bit from it because I want to talk a bit about the beginning and I know you said that’s what you were going to read. So, let’s hear a bit

Victor Lodato: Okay. So I’m going to read the very first thing that came to me when I started this book; this is from the very first chapter, the beginning. All the chapters are titled and this chapter’s called “Chanel No. 5”: Having a life meant having a story; even at eight Edgar knew this. What he didn’t know was his own beginning. Newborn brains were mushy. If you wanted to know how your life had started you had to get this information from other people, but what if these people were liars? “I kept falling asleep,” said Lucy; she was speaking of Edgar’s birth. The boy liked this particular story and so he made sure to roll his head in feigned boredom. “Even with all the pain I was like”—Lucy opened her mouth and made a stupendous snore sound worthy of a cartoon character—“It was nearly three in the morning when you decided to show your face,” she tossed back her hair and turned to the mirror, “and you didn’t make a fuss either. The doctor said he’d never seen a kid care less about being born, slip, slap and back to sleep.” “And then they put me in the box, right, in the glass box?” “Yup, because you were so small and you didn’t wake up for a week.” Edgar didn’t remember any of it. “The size of a dinner roll,” Lucy said with a slight shudder, “and so white I thought you were a frigging ghost.” The boy looked up as his mother swiped a pink stick the color of cake frosting across her lips. “Are you going out, Ma?” “Yes, I am,” she said. “Yes, I am.”

Jo Reed: That’s wonderful. That’s from “Edgar and Lucy,” and, I had marked that first sentence, “Having a life meant having a story; even at eight Edgar knew this.” It was a sentence that completely captivated me and I read that sentence and I said, “I know I’m going to love this book.”

Victor Lodato: <laughs>

Jo Reed: You said you just sat down with a blank piece of paper and that’s what came out?

Victor Lodato: I—and I—again it’s one of the mysteries sometimes of the writing process where these things come out of. You know, a lot of people write an autobiographical novel early on. You know, I’ve been writing for a long time, and only with this book did I feel like I tapped into some of the things from my own childhood, and I think what I loved about Edgar and maybe where that book starts is that Edgar knew there were big things and big themes and secrets in his life and that there was a story in that household but he didn’t really have access to the particulars of it. And for me as a writer, I never start with a plan or agenda, I really start with character and voice, and so as Edgar is searching out for the truth about his family and the past I am also doing that as a writer and that’s what keeps me interested as a writer is that detective work of figuring out okay, so what is this story that Edgar doesn’t really know, well, I don’t know either, and so we sort of hunted out together. I mean it’s funny—in my first book and then even in this book, people have commented about at certain points in the action where they—they say to me, “Well, I never saw that coming. It was such a turn,” and I always have to say, “Well, <laughs> it was the same for me. You know, I was completely surprised when that happened.”

Jo Reed: Did Edgar or Lucy or Florence ever take you down a path, then you got there and you realized not really, this is not going to work?

Victor Lodato: This book took me a long time but there weren’t a lot of false steps. I worked so slowly and meticulously on this. I would get to a point, say a third of the way and then halfway and then three-quarters of the way, where I didn’t know what was next and I had this very laborious process where I’d just go back to the beginning and sort of go through it all, sometimes even early on in the book retype the whole thing and then get to that point, and then I would, you know, live through it emotionally again with the characters and then I would figure out what was next. There were a few places where I thought, oh no, I don’t really want to go <laughs> here but then I went there and then it turned out differently than I expected, you know, something that I—the signs were pointing to something that I thought I knew what it was but when I got there it was something else. It’s a very strange process.

Jo Reed: Yeah, it sounds like a very interesting one too. Back to secrets, Edgar’s living with both Lucy and Florence, and they’re both widows and Edgar is thinking about widows and he thinks they’re almost like witches; they’re “deathy;” they have secrets. That use of the word “deathy” struck me as so perfect because it’s so pointed, it so conveys a child’s way of thinking. How do—how do you access that?

Victor Lodato: Well, it’s interesting. You know, with that word “deathy” when you say that I think—it seems like you didn’t have this reaction but I’m always afraid people will think it’s a writerly conceit, but but, you know, being inside Edgar at that moment, just that word came to me and it just seemed absolutely right for him. You know, accessing the child is something that I have always done in my work. My first novel is also—has a child character and first—it’s first person in the voice of a 12-year-old, and a lot of my plays—I’m also a playwright—have children in them and it isn’t a choice but they keep appearing and now that I’ve done it for so long I can see that, you know, I’m just a person who’s generally confused about the world still, even as an adult I feel like I don’t get it, and I mean I’m writing to try to see if I can get it. And so putting these children into my novels and plays is a way for me to sort of move through the world of a novel with a character who is still trying to figure out the world and I feel like that puts me in this great position where as a writer I don’t feel like I have to have all the answers; I can be very innocent about my own anxieties and confusions. And I feel like in some ways having children in my books keeps me honest as a writer.

Jo Reed: Well, there’s a magic that goes through this book, I mean not wizards and not dragons but it’s more like a homespun quotidian magic, and there are moments in the book—well as I said, I’m just not sure where it’s going.

Victor Lodato: <laughs> That was a good thing I hope.

Jo Reed: Yes, a very good thing.

Victor Lodato: You know, I think some people had read the book and were even expecting it to go into something truly magical but I think this is a book that’s rooted in real characters and real psychologies, but the story is so big, it being a gothic, that it does aspire at times to almost be a storybook kind of version of this Italian family’s life. You know, that’s one of the reasons why it jumps into the past and then jumps into the future. I felt like, you know, in some ways I wanted it to be exhaustive; I wanted it you to see the whole picture from beginning to end and in some ways, this book encouraged a kind of symmetry and ending that I might not normally put on another kind of book.

Jo Reed: Well, as you mentioned, it’s the second novel you’ve written with a child at its center, “Mathilda Savitch” being the first—and as you said, she’s the sole narrator of her book, whereas “Edgar and Lucy” is told from multiple perspectives, through various characters, even the dog at one point—good old Jackie, a shout-out for Jack—and then sometimes we have an omniscient narrator. Can you talk about moving through all those perspectives and moving the story from the eyes of one of the characters into the eyes of another.

Victor Lodato: You know, again, it was a completely intuitive process. I have described it once before as, when I was writing it I felt access to many characters and when I would shift, you know, sometimes within a single paragraph, sometimes from chapter to chapter, but sometimes within a single page, we’d have several perspectives, and the only way that I can describe it is sort of like being in this big ocean and I could feel the character change as a temperature or tidal shift and I would just go with it. And I remember—you know I did not study writing. I started in the theater, I was an actor, and then I started writing plays for myself and multi-character plays and then I began a novel many years ago. I didn’t know I was writing a novel, I thought I was writing a long monologue, which is how my first novel started. I remember teaching a class at a university and then being out afterwards with the students and I—I was talking a little bit about this new novel I was working on with Edgar and Lucy and I mentioned how it shifts perspectives sometimes within a paragraph and a student said to me, “Oh, I thought you’re not supposed to do that,” and I got really nervous because I thought oh, am I not supposed to do that? And I remember asking my editor and she said, “Well”-- she says “It’s hard to do so that’s why maybe it’s not often recommended but I think you can do it so just trust yourself.”

Jo Reed: Both your novels deal with, among other things, really profound loss and grief. “Edgar and Lucy” in some way is a landscape of loss. What drew you to that—what draws you to that?

Victor Lodato: Yeah. It’s a good question, and I think when I started my first novel, “Mathilda Savitch,” it was about a year after 9/11 and also my mother was diagnosed with cancer and was quite sick at that time, and so the book started to be an exploration of national grief and family grief—those two currents were moved through the book. Mathilda in the book is—there’s a terrorist act that happens in the country and then also her sister has died a year before the book begins, so I think that’s how grief got into that book. I was still reeling from 9/11, and then from my mother’s diagnosis, and then my mother died just before that book was published. And so I think “Edgar and Lucy” was still a continuum of now going to the next level of trying to understand my mother’s absence and though she’s different than Lucy in some ways, the best of Lucy is—is my mother, and some of the difficult parts of Lucy too, and so I—I guess “Edgar and Lucy” really became a love story on many levels, a family love story, a romantic love story, but it really was about the profundity of losing one’s mother.

Jo Reed: You mentioned that you started as an actor? Tell me about that. How did you family respond to you deciding you were going to be an actor?

Victor Lodato: Well, you know, I come from a very working-class family. You know, my mother was a waitress, my father was a barber. There wasn’t a lot of pushing toward sort of academic greatness or big careers, and I was the first person in my family to go to college and the choice to be an actor was, you know, an odd one because I was a very, very shy child—even young adult; it was very hard for me to even speak if there was more than <laughs> two people in a room. And so I feel like my choice to become an actor was try just to figure out something that would force me to talk, and so I was drawn to that, it fascinated me that, you know, you’d be required to be on a stage and saying things in front of rooms full of people, and it did make me braver, it did help. Though I think I was good at it and got some acclaim for it, I just found it didn’t suit my personality. And so I eventually started writing—writing plays—instead of performing them and when I did that I just thought I prefer writing them, I enjoy this time writing them and I love seeing the other actors sweating it out on the stage. And then as I said, I had been writing plays for over ten years and then I was at an artist residency, I finished a play, I thought well, I’ll start another one, and then I started what I thought was a monologue that would start a play, and then the monologue went on for fifty pages, a hundred pages, and then I thought hmm, maybe this is a novel.

Jo Reed: <laughs> And, in fact, you got a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Victor Lodato: Yeah.

Jo Reed: Right? It’s an NEA Solo Artist Fellowship.

Victor Lodato: Yes, in the olden times when they gave out those things, but it was amazing; I mean you can’t imagine. I mean I was living in Tucson, Arizona, I was performing these solo plays at a little 99-seat theater there and I had written maybe four or five of them, and when I got that grant from the NEA at that time—not only the money to just set aside time to write and work for a while, but the validation that maybe I could actually do this; maybe I could make a life here. It was very, very important to me and something that I remain grateful for.

Jo Reed: Can you discuss the difference between writing for the page and writing for the stage.

Victor Lodato: I think of everything when I’m writing—to me it’s always a kind of music. I’m very much involved with the music of a piece and there’s something about a play—it’s a simpler kind of music. You have just the dialog, and so I really enjoy that kind of, in some ways compared to in a novel, this sort of minimalist music where you’re just dealing with voices. In a novel it’s much more symphonic, and to me now after writing novels, I’ve been focused on that but now I’m thinking I have a play idea I might want to go back to, and even though plays are hard after writing “Edgar and Lucy” writing a play in my mind I think oh, that sounds like a vacation.

Jo Reed: But, theater is so collaborative. I mean, I think and obviously there are other people involved in the novel—you have editors, readers, etc.—but it is pretty much a solitary thing. What you set out to do is what gets done whereas often in theater, things are being changed constantly up until opening night.

Victor Lodato: Yes, and that was always very stressful for me and so yeah, it’s—again, novel writing is more suited to my personality, both my solitary nature and probably my controlling part of my personality as well. You know, there are some playwrights who absolutely love the rehearsal process. I find it extremely difficult and painful. I love actors and love them to broaden my thoughts about what a character is or what this play is, but because I’ve always had a very clear music in my head for how any character sounds, at first when I hear the music coming from another body and it’s very different from how I imagined it, I find that physically painful. Eventually, I let go because I know that the actor has to have that character in their own body, they have to reinvent it, but it was always very difficult for me, I mean it’s—still that part, rehearsal process, trying to keep my mouth shut and not say, “Stop. Could you just do it like this?”

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Victor Lodato: —which is not done.

Jo Reed: Can you tell me about your writing practice.

Victor Lodato: Sure. I’m pretty disciplined. I now spend most of my time in Ashland, Oregon, which is, you know, a small town; there’s not a lot to do here. So it’s a lovely place, but I—I pretty much try to get to my desk when I’m writing—in my writing periods, which can last for half the year or longer depending on, you know, other theater commitments or other travel commitments, but I don’t like to speak in the morning to anyone; I don’t like to read the newspaper. I read a book in the morning, a novel or poetry, and then I try to get to my desk very early because the hours between sort of eight o’clock and two o’clock feel like the most fertile time for me. I try to get to my desk every day and I start with a revision of what I wrote the day before, at least a few pages back. I’m always uncomfortable just starting something new. I—like an actor almost—I have to warm up and sort of get into the characters and do a improv in the character by—with those few pages and then I’m off to the races, hopefully.

Jo Reed: Can you see how those years of play writing contributed to the way you write fiction? That wonderful dialog that you have obviously comes to mind.

Victor Lodato: Ah, yeah. Thank you, and definitely. You know, as I said, my writing is a very physical process. You know, it doesn’t feel very different from being in a rehearsal room when I was an actor. I’m never—I mean, not often am I thinking of the characters from the outside; I’m really trying to write from inside the characters so I’m always speaking everything out loud when I’m writing, all the dialog, all the description. You know, I’m sitting at the edge of my seat, and I really feel like I’m performing it and I think probably from my work in the theater, I have an ability to suspend disbelief and—and believe that I can be someone other than Victor, so that’s really helpful. And I think probably in terms of comparing the theater to the novel, there’s something about—in a book, in a novel, that the medium of it is memory, that something’s already happened and the writer is recounting that, where in a play, the medium is fate; these things are happening right now; the characters’ fates are being decided. So when I’m writing I’m trying to be more in that theater or drama frame of mind where I’m trying to imagine that these things are happening just as I’m writing them, so that there can be a sort of present-tense theatricality about the work and I hope that comes through in the writing.

Jo Reed: Oh yes, I think it does. This isn’t quite the right word, so just bear with me as I search for the right one. The characters in your book are extremely complicated, and they sometimes do things that are by any measure just not good things to do—

Victor Lodato: Mm-hmm

Jo Reed: —And yet you write them in such a way and to say you’re not judging them—it—it’s more than that. We never lose sight of their humanity so even people who are doing things that are truly not good things to do, your heart is still breaking for them.

Victor Lodato: Well, I’m glad to hear that. Because I’m writing from inside character, if there is judgment, it’s when Lucy is judging herself—but it’s also my really strong desire—I mean as a person who grew up very shy and shut off and unable to talk to other people—part of the writing process for me is sort of like who are other people? I really, really try to—want to understand. You know, I’ve seen in my own family, people do some terrible things and that can upset me or I can really say, “I want to understand why they did that,” and so maybe it’s the focus on that. You know, I’m less interested in judging them or making a villain, than I am in trying to sort of understand where those things come from and because I’m living inside the character I guess that’s why there feels like there’s a lack of judgment. You know, someone had said that once about Olive Kitteridge—“I didn’t like that book because I really didn’t like that character; they were not nice.” And I thought well, Olive Kitteridge—she’s not your mother; she’s not your roommate; she’s a character in a book. And I always think—she’s so fascinating though, and I just I want to spend time; I want to understand what makes her tick. And I think that is what is so civilizing about fiction, not just the writing of it but the reading of it, because it’s not just about what will happen next. Yes, you want to book to sort of hold you to that edge—I want to know what’s going to happen—but you want to know who is this other person, who are other people in general, and I think that you know, there’s these existential opportunities to sort of understand and maybe even to love someone who is nothing like you. And I think that’s where the miracle of art can happen—you can change; your heart can possibly change. So I want that for myself as a writer, I want writing to change who I am, to change my heart, and ultimately I want it to do that to my readers, and so maybe approaching character that way allows me to get closer to that possibility.

Jo Reed: And tell me, what are you working on now?

Victor Lodato: I won’t tell you what character but there was a character in “Edgar and Lucy,” a peripheral character who I have remained fascinated with and have a number of pages about her and have been writing more about this character and I think it’s turning into another novel. So I am focusing on another crazy New Jersey character and then also I’m continuing to write short fiction. I love writing short stories; it’s—I think it’s a very, very difficult form. I think I wrote my first successful story in 2012 or something, and ever since then I feel like I understand this form, at least my relationship to it, so whenever I get exhausted from working on the novel, I take a break and pull out one of my story files and work on a story. So a new novel and just about finished with a collection of short stories.

Jo Reed: Well, I look forward to it, I truly do. Thanks so much.

Victor Lodato: Thank you.

Jo Reed: That was author and playwright Victor Lodato. His most recent novel is called Edgar and Lucy. You've been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. You can subscribe to Art Works wherever you get your podcasts, so please do. And leave us a rating on Apple because it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

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