After the Nouveau Roman: an Interview with Writer Donald Breckenridge

What most immediately impresses me about Donald Breckenridge’s novel And Then is how remote his predecessors are from our contemporary moment, yet how immediate the book feels regardless. Most writers form themselves in relation to more or less familiar contemporary figures (David Foster Wallace’s legacy seems particularly large in younger writers these days, for example), with the result that, for better and for worse, readers immediately see where they are. But Breckenridge cut his teeth on more distant literary traditions—largely foreign, specifically French—which makes his writing wonderfully strange, both in its challenges and its gratifications.

And Then is a book about death and haunting. It is an oddly but subtly constructed dance of storylines that only tangentially overlap—some more tangentially than others—organized around resonances between the stories, ideas or feelings that haunt the book through recurrence. One storyline follows a young woman, Suzanne, who becomes involved in a small town crime and ends up in New York, where she drifts through the art world but gets “mixed up with the wrong people” and disappears. Another follows a student in New York years later housesitting for a professor who’d once been Suzanne’s roommate. A third is an autobiographical account of Breckenridge’s father’s health problems and eventual death. The book is a brilliant example of dramatic restraint, building characters and complexities gradually and quietly, ultimately coming together with unexpected coherence and effect.

Donald Breckenridge is the author of three previous novels as well as being the fiction editor of the Brooklyn Rail, co-curator of the website InTranslation—which features works-in-progress by translators around the world—and most recently managing editor of Red Dust, a landmark small publisher focusing on, among other things, mid-20th Century French writers. I interviewed him by email in late May 2017.

—Martin Riker

THE BELIEVER: The introduction you wrote for NYRBooks’ most recent Emmanuel Bove translation starts by calling Bove a “master of hyper-objectivity” and goes on to cite his influence on Nouveau Roman writers Claude Simon and Nathalie Sarraute. In the tradition of establishing lineage, I want to start by asking what you mean by hyper-objectivity and what this literary value—maybe in particular as it relates to the Nouveau Roman—has meant for you in your own work?

DONALD BRECKENRIDGE: By hyper-objectivity I mean that everything is equally relevant and yet you have to do a lot more with much less. Emmanuel Bove’s writing is incredibly rapid and deceptively simple—especially in the early books. He is always direct in thought and expression and possesses a cinematographers’ eye for detail and composition. He has extraordinary empathy for his characters and that gives them an immediate timeworn granite-like substance, but they are never portrayed...