[In the following interview, Frayn discusses the writing of The Trick of It while reflecting on his literary career and writing process.]

Michael Frayn is renowned for debunking the interview. In the 1960s he had a column in the Manchester Guardian in which he chatted with visiting celebrities. Very gradually Frayn moved the column toward fantasy, “interviewing” characters he created, gulling the public in the process. And in his new novel, The Trick of It, out this month from Viking, one of the themes is the impossibility of knowing a writer from his or her work, the futility of undertaking an analysis to explain how a book emerges from a novelist's life. These precedents rather stymie an interview with Michael Frayn before the first sip of white wine.

Does “the trick of it,” PW wonders, refer to a trick Frayn has learned about how to write fiction—a trick that eludes the novel's narrator, who envies his wife, a famous novelist? Frayn elucidates: “What the novel is about is not just the writing of books, it is about the opacity of other people's mental processes—about how hard it is to see what's going on inside somebody else's head. You would like to know how other people feel, how other people think, so all the time you have to make projections, but you can't in fact know.” Those limitations stated, he lets himself be dragged reluctantly into a cross-examination.

In addition to six very amusing novels, Frayn at 57 is a writer of stage farce, the preeminent English translator of Chekhov, and—as one might assume from the above remarks—a philosopher in the mold of Wittgenstein. He was born in the far north London suburb of Mill Hill, over a chain wine store, and when he was 18 months of age the family moved to Newall, Surrey, on the far south side of London. He is reticent about his childhood, partly because his schooldays were emotionally taxing, partly because his mother died when he was 13, and his troubled relationship with his stepmother was such that even now he cannot slough it off with jokes. Although his father was in the business of selling asbestos, they were upper-middle-class—comfortable enough that the exotic allure of Communism was an enticement to the young Frayn.

Though his attraction to that political system eventually paled, it served as the impetus for his study of the Russian language. After a stint in the armed forces, learning more Russian, Frayn entered Cambridge, initially to pursue a combined French and Russian course. He abandoned that for Philosophy, however, when he discovered that he could apply himself to unwieldy philosophical questions but not to the fine points of literary criticism. Ironically, the narrator of The Trick of It is an academic, proficient in the kind of literary criticism Frayn gave up. “It wasn't that I didn't enjoy it: I could do it. I greatly admire people who can do it, but I am as blank as to what's going on in their minds as my narrator is to what is going on in the novelist's mind.”

Frayn lives with Claire Tomalin, one of Britain's sharpest literary critics and the biographer of Katherine Mansfield (she is at present writing the biography of Charles Dickens's mistress). So though The Trick of It might be read as Frayn's case against those who regard books from a critical standpoint, as opposed to those to whom books are their whole lives, it is not an argument that Frayn intended. “They are different standpoints, but they can manage to be reconciled. The world of people who study books and the world of people who write books overlap—but it is not the same world.”

After one unsuccessful comedy, Zounds, which he wrote for the Cambridge Footlights club in his university days, Frayn stopped writing plays. (“People didn't find it as funny as they should. But people rarely do find things as funny as they should.”) Before he truly launched his career as a writer for the stage, in 1970, he spent several years as a journalist, first for the Guardian and then for the Observer, and much of his spare time writing novels. He published five novels between 1965 and 1967; the first, The Tin Man, with Little, Brown in the U.S., and the remainder with Viking. His novels remain in print in Britain though not in America (“In America I don't suppose anyone remembers I've written any novels at all.”)

Then, in 1970, he wrote his first stage comedy, The Two of Us, followed by a string of wild, and wildly successful, farces including Noises Off and The Benefactors. Wild Honey, his adaptation of a little-known Chekhov play, Platonov, was warmly received in London but not on Broadway. The West End is currently embracing Frayn's fine translation of The Cherry Orchard. Frayn's newest farce, and also his first full-length stage play in six years, Look, Look, opened in Italy in January and will arrive at a West End theatre later this year.

But while his career as a dramatist surged ahead, Frayn's fiction writing stalled. For 16 years he did not produce a novel, although he started and discarded a few. “I didn't give up novels, novels gave up me. I think it was a loss of some authorial voice. In a sense I got around the problem in The Trick of It by writing the story through a character.”

The Trick of It is told through the voice of an academic who writes jokey, irreverent letters to a colleague in Australia. “What really attracted me to writing a story in letters is the question of placing the narrative in time. In traditional narrative you tell a story by starting at the beginning and going through to the end, and so, though your standpoint as a narrator is after the story has finished, the artifice, the convention, is not to reveal at the beginning of the story what you already know. The more you think about it, the odder this is. The advantage of doing it in letters is that your standpoint is at the end of each letter, so the narrator, too, can be genuinely surprised by the developments in the story.”

The drawback of many epistolary novels is that the letter-writer's voice can all too quickly become a humdrum one. Frayn's narrator, however, has a Fraynish sense of farce when writing to his friend. “I once had a correspondence not entirely unlike that one—with Alan Bennett [Britain's other celebrated writer of stage comedy] who had been in the National Service Russian course with me,” Frayn says. “Then I went to Cambridge, he went to Oxford, and we started a correspondence which was mutually mocking. It was a performance. His letters were absolutely marvelous, very funny, illustrated, written on long pieces of wallpaper and things like that. Mine were very boring, unillustrated and on ordinary pieces of typing paper.”

Indeed, everyone still remarks on the incongruity of Frayn's over-the-top comedy appearing on ordinary typing paper and from a very disciplined writing routine. Nine years ago, after he and his wife separated, he bought a flat nearby so as to be close to his three daughters—and from 9 to 5 that south London flat became his office. It meant hours of a punishing commute through knots of London traffic from the large house he shares with Tomalin in Camden Town, on the other side of London, but only now, with his daughters grown and living elsewhere—one a BBC-TV director, one a journalist, one studying politics at university—is Frayn getting around to relocating his office closer to home.

He continues to stick to what many writers would think is a long working day. “Peter de Vries said a good thing,” he recalls, “about how he writes only when he is inspired but he just makes sure he is inspired at nine o'clock every morning.” Frayn's own guideline is a French saying—“The appetite comes as you eat”—“and that is very true in writing,” he says.

Frayn writes on several word processors, including one that produces Cyrillic characters. He has branched into scriptwriting—the John Cleese film Clockwise, for example, and more recently an acclaimed TV film called First and Last. He has so many strings to his bow, one urges him to explain how he chooses what to do when. It is, however, a line of inquiry he waves away dismissively: “It looks as though freelance writers are very self-determining, but usually they just do what they can do at the moment.”

Frayn marvels at the presumption of people who imagine they can advise writers on how to monitor their career and about what to write next—suggestions like the narrator in The Trick of It makes to his novelist-wife. “It goes beyond criticism,” he laughs. “The other day I was interviewed on BBC Radio 3 and was extremely surprised when Professor Anthony Bray, who was being very kind about my Russian translations, began to tell me what kind of book I should write next.”

It is not that Frayn is obstreperous: he gives credit where it is due to his editors and his New York agent, Roberta Pryor. It was Pryor's idea to send The Trick of It to Robert Gottlieb at the New Yorker, who published it “whole” in a single issue—minus a third of Frayn's words. Though there were a few comments about the “condensation” evincing New Yorker leanings toward “Reader's-Digestation,” Frayn was pleased. “I thought Gottlieb's editing was extremely cunning. He sent me all his suggestions for cuts, and I occasionally made cuts to his suggestions.” Surprisingly, Frayn had never before published in the New Yorker.

Frayn is a meticulous man, very careful about details, and inclined to qualify an interviewer's generalizations with special cases and slight reservations. Yet he has a relaxed manner, entwines his height stylishly upon and around furniture, and often breaks into a warm smile. His dress tends toward windbreakers and earthy colours of corduroy, his keys hanging from his belt. He has a high bald brow and blue eyes—and has been described as Nordic-looking, Bergmanesque, and as if he should be a prime minister of Sweden.

His new novel's title, The Trick of It, keeps inviting interpretation. The narrator's novelist wife has “the trick of it”: the ability to bring characters to life—to take someone from real life (in this case, the narrator's mother) and make that character “live” in a novel. Frayn stresses he does not write that kind of “realistic” novel and he sides with his narrator, who insists that his wife, the novelist, hasn't got inside the head of his mother. “He insists that his mother was nothing like that, but his wife had produced something completely plausible—and that is what maddens him. It is true, isn't it, as I've said, we can't know anything about the internal processes of another human being. Even writers can't get inside people, but what writers can do is make something which seems as if they have.” Frayn nods in agreement with the nice distinction. “That is a philosophical cheat, and my narrator is right to be deeply offended.”

Frayn's academic/narrator shows his admiration for his wife, and also his umbrage, by abbreviating his course-description of her—“a major writer of our time”—to “MajWOOT.” And “Majwoot” is an acronymic coinage that has gained currency in Britain since the novel was published there last September. In all modesty, Frayn says he does not believe anyone is inclined to regard him “as one of the world's major novelists.” Not a Majwoot. But we'll see.