[In the following interview, originally conducted in February 1994, Butler discusses his career as a novelist and the influence of the theater and playwriting on his work.]

Of the Americans writing about the Vietnam War, Robert Olen Butler is one of the few who focuses on the Vietnamese people themselves rather than the effects of the war experience on Americans and the American culture or psyche. This interview was conducted in February 1994, shortly after Butler won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of stories A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992), a book he recognizes as an artistic breakthrough for him. In the interview he talks about his development as a novelist, including the ultimate effects of studying theater and playwriting on his work. His theater studies led him to appreciate method acting, and his decision to adopt the first-person narrator in order to directly examine a variety of cultures and the experience of both genders is at the core of his development as a writer. He believes that fiction is a special kind of discourse that presents human experience as universally understandable and that the language and grammar of writing are sensual and emotional. Successful literature, to Butler, is not created through the development of ideas but through deep immersion of the artist's senses in a shared, unconscious pool of experiences with his characters. They Whisper (1994) is a controversial tour de force of sexual energy in which the first person male narrator lapses into the voices of “all the women he ever loved.” Tabloid Dreams (1996), his most recent collection of stories, is written from the points of view of a series of characters imagined from the outrageous headlines of tabloid newspapers.

[Interviewer]: Your father was the chair of the theater department at St. Louis University and you grew up in Granite City, Illinois, the quintessential factory or blue-collar town.

[Butler]: I spent summers working in the Granite City steel mill. As I grew up I was every bit as comfortable talking Cardinals baseball with fellow members of the labor gang at the blast furnace as I was talking aesthetic theory with my father's colleagues at St. Louis University. Granite City is not a racially mixed city but it's full of exiles from the Deep South. There were forty thousand people in the city at that time and one high school, and I was the student-body president so I had good friends through the whole socioeconomic range. The sense of cultural collision that you find particularly in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain I think flows from not just my experience in Vietnam but from my very childhood.

You went to school at Northwestern University, first as a theater major, an actor. Eventually you took a master's degree in playwriting from the University of Iowa. What changed your direction?

I was more interested in acting than anything else when I was in high school. I went off to Northwestern in the fall of’63. Northwestern was, and still is, one of the premier training grounds for professional theater people. In that first year I was in four of the six major productions and had a major role in one of them, which was quite good. But into my sophomore year, I became restless with acting. I wanted to write, and since I was working in the theater I just assumed that the theater was what I should write for. On my twenty-first birthday, January of 1966, I was living at 626 Library Place in the top floor of a rooming house run by a very unusual old bachelor of a high school English teacher. I looked out over the snowy rooftops of Evanston and said, “Well, if you really think you’re going to be a writer, you’d better write something.” So I sat down and wrote, in the next couple of months, a full-length play called The Rooming House about that house and the people there. By the time I finished my master's at the University of Iowa, I had written a dozen full-length plays. The following eleven got worse and worse. I was a terrible playwright because I was in fact a nascent novelist trying to work in the wrong medium.

What's the difference?

Plays and movies are collaborative art forms. The writer is responsible for two things only: structure, and to some lesser extent, dialogue. But even that is a collaborative process with the actors. If you don’t understand and embrace your limitation as an artist you will write badly. I think artists write because they encounter the chaos of life on the planet Earth and yet have some deep instinct of order behind that chaos. If what you see about the world is deeply embedded in the moment-to-moment sensual flow of experience, then you’re not going to be satisfied as an artist whose sensual access to that material resides in a different artist.

John Gardner referred to fiction as the “whole hog”: politics, history, anthropology, sociology, poetry; you get everything in fiction. Do you relate to that notion of the novel?

I was ready to embrace that idea, but when you started naming off those rational, abstracting sciences, I recoiled. I think fiction exists as a mode of discourse separate from any other because it resists and excludes the abstract and the rational and the ideational and the philosophical and the anthropological and sociological. All those things are the province of other modes of discourse. I don’t think literature exists as a kind of elaborate word game where we sit around and talk rationally about what that work of art means. It's antithetical to the reason work is created and it's antithetical to the way the work should be encountered by a reader. There are 138,000 words in They Whisper. The only true answer to what that book means is to open the book up and read those 138,000 words again. The abstracting of our feelings, the interpreting, the analyzing, all those rational processes that we apply to our feelings are there in order to distance ourselves, to manage, to control, to shape, to vent off the direct, powerful hold these things have on us.

How does the writer shape then? The artistic unconscious delivers, but the writer has to shape.

It's the interlocking, the weaving together of the deeply patterned motifs of the sensual world, that conveys a sense of order. That's why art is organic. Every sensual object, every moment, every word, every action, every metaphor in a true work of art resonates into everything else, links everything else. The tiniest example for you: in Countrymen of Bones, on page 2, Darell Reeves is out in the excavation site. He holds up his trowel, his basic tool. It's the thing that uncovers the past, and, in a way, uncovers himself to him. Now there are many different physical attributes he could consider at that moment, the heft of his trowel, the color of the blade, the texture of the handle, the pattern of earth clinging to the blade, but in fact he looks at it and notices that its blade is as strong and flexible as a Toledo sword. That's a very vivid sensual image. We see the thing clearly, and that's one of the levels at which art works. A hundred and fifty pages later, one of the ranchers gallops into the excavation site and takes Darell and the two young graduate-assistant workers hostage. That incident ends with Darell finally acting. And he does what?

He stabs him with his trowel.

Exactly. He picks up the trowel and kills the man with it. Now, I wouldn’t expect any reader to hold that initial image consciously in her head until that moment, but the vision of the book is manifest in the sensual impact of that trowel as he holds it, as he contemplates its blade, as the blade enters the flesh of a man.

About eleven years ago you said, “I write novels to explore for myself and to reveal to others my vision of the fundamental patterns inherent in the flux of experience.” Is that still your conviction?

Explore is the crucial word. I distinguish between literature and nonliterature in this way. Stephen King, Danielle Steel, even people like Jean-Paul Sartre understand ahead of time what effect they wish to convey, what ideas they wish to get across. Then they construct an object to do that. The artist responds to the world directly. He has some deep vision of order, but has no idea what that vision is until the object is created. The artist creates the object as much to explore as to express his vision. That's the fundamental distinction between what artists do and what entertainers or ideologues do.

Anatole Broyard, the New York Times reviewer, spoke of you as a novelist of ideas, and Philip Biedler's study of the so-called Vietnam writers, Rewriting America, calls you the most political writer of your generation of Vietnam-era writers.

Everything I’ve been saying so far would seem to militate against both of those observations about me. But both men, I think, were on to something very important about the philosophical and political implications of art. The reason I can be so effective in the realm of ideas and the reason I can be so effective in the realm of politics is that I ignore both of those things when I write. I think it was Swift who said that you can’t reason a person out of a position that he didn’t reason himself into in the first place. The vast majority of the political beliefs that most people have are deeply irrational. We watch McNeill/Lehrer and read the New York Times in order to find some intellectual rationale for feeling the way we do. The work of art, because it ignores abstract ideas and touches the deepest irrational, sensual self, is better able to shape political ideas where they are truly formed.

Three characters from The Alleys of Eden each went on to become central to a subsequent novel. Was that by design?

No. When I was writing bad plays, one of the ways I knew I wanted to be a novelist, at least in retrospect, is that I kept writing cycles of plays, with the same characters continuing on. Ironically enough, I got intrigued with a couple of secondary characters from the first novel I wrote when I got back from Vietnam in the fall of’72. I called it What Lies Near. David Fleming was the central character and Clifford Wilkes was a minor character. By the time The Alleys of Eden finally got published I had written six novels, including What Lies Near. On the fourth published novel, I went back to David Fleming and did him right. So the sense of characters going on was created backwards. Every character I create, no matter how small, becomes enormously interesting to me. They branch out into some other corner or pocket or vein in my artistic unconscious and begin to work there.

Why did you move back to the past with Countrymen of Bones and Wabash?

I don’t know. In a way going back to the fall of Vietnam was a kind of historical move, too. Going back to the energy crisis was a historical move as well, in a sense, because when I wrote those books we had gone past those events in some conclusive way. I’ve always been drawn to the large, external historical, cultural event that itself echoes the inner-personal pattern of the characters.

Was a family story behind Wabash?

Oh, sure. My mother and my mother's mother and my mother's sisters were wonderful storytellers but there are no real-life counterparts to any of my characters. Graham Greene said that all good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination. All the characters in my work are creatures of the compost. Carlos Fuentes, I think, called the novel a pack of lies hounding the truth, and my books are the truest lies that I can tell. If anybody reads They Whisper looking for biographical details of me or my three wives or any other women I’ve loved or my son or my parents, they will be drastically misled. None of us exist in that book. On a deeper level, I am nakedly present in They Whisper and Ira Holloway. I would hasten to add, however, that They Whisper is not an attempt to find the unified field theory of human sexuality. It is a partial vision of myself and of what I see. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is deeply and nakedly me, as well, in every aspect of every character in the sense that I am pouring my most impassioned encounter with the world and my most ardent search for its meaning into every word, every image of that and every book.

I read your novels in sequence and it seems to me that if there's a breakthrough book, a book where you found your voice, it was The Deuce.

I think you are absolutely right. It was the first book I wrote in the first person. The first five novels were my playwright self, from The Deuce on I’ve gone back to being an actor. I become the role, I become the character. In A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain it felt like I was speaking in tongues at times. I can’t even imagine going back to the third person now. There's a great deal to explore with the first person. Look at They Whisper—the first-person voice of a man who lapses into the first-person voices of women, not as a kind of transsexual experience, but as the ultimate expression of heterosexual love.

I’d like to talk about They Whisper. Why did you choose to center the book around a character as dysfunctional as Fiona in taking on the task of exploring heterosexual love and relationships?

Fiona is not the center of the book, as Ira keeps pointing out. Fiona is one very important, but only one, sexual and sensual and female influence in the book. All the women are equally important in certain ways. Fiona's presence in the book, however, is as strong and dysfunctional as it is because she is the dark counterimage to Ira. He sees sex as a kind of secular sacrament. Churches understand sacraments as a physical something that resonates into the cosmic sphere. For Ira, women's bodies are that. Though Ira loves many women, he loves them absolutely and individually. For him a woman's body is a sacramentally charged metaphor for the inner secrets of her unique personality, which he seeks even through hearing and taking on her woman's voice. For him there is a kind of holy grail that is unattainable: Karen Granger, the little girl that he loved one summer. For him, sexuality is a powerful life force. Fiona is the dark counterimage to that. She has had sexual encounters with many men. But they were part of a constant search for reassurance that she is not loathsome. In place of Ira's holy grail, she has from her childhood the dark malignant influence of her sexually abusive father. Instead of being connected to the life force, sexuality for her is connected to death. Fiona and Ira are the yin and the yang; it's the life and death, wellness and sickness, connection and disconnection, that come together in that union.

A critical aspect of this book is the women's voices. I hadn’t even conceived They Whisper until I wrote A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Notably enough, Ira Holloway and I are strictly heterosexual, exclusively so, and yet I could not conceive a book, I could not write a book about the essence of male heterosexuality—what it is, how it drives a man, what the dark sides are—with the complexity it required until I found the woman's voice in me. Ira carries an inner landscape around with him in which dwell all the women he has ever loved, and as he meditates on them he lapses into their first-person voices. It is the ultimate act of intimacy, to leave the self and to join the other in the inner self.

But at the end of the book, he still feels incomplete.

They Whisper does not intend to discover a unified field theory of human sexuality. But it says things that I think are deeply true about our yearnings. And it is not just the man who continues to yearn for that deep connection where bodies are the way in. Women do too. Society has been much more efficient in suppressing that urge in women, but it is there. The question is, if sexuality is a kind of search for glimpses into the infinite, is it possible for any one relationship ever to be so complete as to exclude any other yearning or any other need for connection?

Do you think that in any good story there is any such thing as a reliable narrator?

The work itself will encourage or discourage that half or full step back from the narrator. In They Whisper there is the tiniest little bit of distancing. We probably have our own independent sense—inevitably given the subject matter—of Ira's choices and decisions and priorities and so forth. But I think we trust him to be pretty thoroughly self-aware. He is prepared to feel guilty. He deeply regrets deception and pain and he tries rigorously to avoid deceiving anyone and to avoid inflicting pain in relationships and he is very conscious in trying to examine a profoundly mysterious impulse. Reviewers speak of Ira as if he were an acquaintance, a real person, and that's fine, that's good. To some extent to write about this subject matter you’ve got to build that into the process. If you get a half a dozen of your literary friends around a dinner table and say, “Let's name all the serious literary novels that we can about war,” twenty minutes later you’ve got two hundred titles on the table. You say, “Okay, let's name all the serious literary novels we can about family relationships.” It's going to take an hour and you’ll have five hundred titles on the table. Then you say, “Let's name all the serious literary works of fiction that we can about the essence of human sexuality. Not just books with sex in them, but that really go at that subject head-on.” There's going to be a lot of silence and you’re going to stir your coffee and think and look out the window, and you probably won’t get off the fingers of that one proverbial hand. There are reasons for that. This deeply personal reaction is one. Another is the limits of the language. Though the English language has more words than any other, the words for those most intimate of body parts involved in this most intimate of human activities don’t carry with them the connotations of vulnerability and tenderness and cosmic resonance that many of us feel about those parts. They are either too clinical and scientific and bloodless or gross and trivializing and dismissive and pornographic. When I wrote They Whisper, with every word I felt as if I was reinventing the form of the novel and reinventing the language in certain ways.

You’ve made it clear that you think we should trust Ira. But the big problem with first-person narrative is that by definition every human being is limited; therefore the reader is going to recognize things that the narrator cannot. What are some of the main things that you would hope the reader sees in They Whisper that Ira can’t see for himself?

That's a difficult question because you are asking me to reconsider the whole book in exactly the kind of psychoanalytical abstracting terms that I have resisted in writing it. You trust him as much as any single human consciousness can be trusted. By and large we are led to distrust Ira in the same ways he distrusts himself. At any given moment, a reader might well be able to anticipate Ira's conclusions about certain things. For instance, we might well sense that Ira is not whole before he is able to declare it. He is so close to the women he loves that it is impossible for him to get a perspective on the dark side or incompleteness as soon as we would. He is deeply in love with and caught up in that glimpse into the infinite present even in the fading fingertips of a waitress on a cold wineglass. As much as he is able to evoke that for us, we are still a little bit separate. There can well be a range of personal reactions to him as a human being which I think still fit within the frame of a book about human intimacy and sexuality. To keep that range of human personal reaction within an artistic frame is the best that one can hope for and may be something quite special on its own.

In her review of They Whisper, Jane Smiley wrote that men of the Vietnam generation live “the realities of imperialism, both abroad and in the home, without conviction.” How would you respond?

On one level there is some validity to that but I think to limit it to men of the Vietnam era would be a big mistake. This is a universal and ages-old impulse of men that has existed since Solomon had two thousand wives and David lusted after somebody else's wife.

But Bathsheba was not allowed to lust after a lot of men and that's the difference I am getting at. We have a whole generation of men who accept that women have sex lives just like them, but it's a reality that you don’t often find reflected in contemporary fiction.

That impulse needs to be understood and accepted and embraced by and for women, and we have to take out society's reflex aversion to that impulse in men. Men who continue to love women throughout their life and feel that they might well be in love with more than one woman at once are treated as absolutely reprehensible. But there are many men for whom that impulse to continue to love women is deeply serious. They revere the individuality and the uniqueness of each woman and are seeking that connection to the cosmos. But Ira and men like him are terribly vulnerable. And for the men who feel that vulnerability and can’t live with it, one defense mechanism is to coarsen and diminish the impulse. They turn it into the reprehensible thing which is the objectifying of women and womanizing for the sake of power and possession, and these men ultimately kill that deeper self. It is terribly important to realize that the impulse exists in both men and women and that it exists in a serious and beautiful way.

It strikes a lot of your readers that you did a very, very nervy thing in writing not only They Whisper but A Good Scent [A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain] as well. You took a lot of risks.

That's true. The books are full of risks, and that's the only way I can continue to write. I just have to think about going deeper and deeper and deeper in. I only write from the place that my inspiration and my deepest concerns lead me. In this case it's led me not only into other cultures, but into the other gender as well. My conviction is that artists are in the business of breaking down those barriers between us. Every human being on the planet, I think, carries around the fear that, in spite of appearances, each of us is utterly alone. And it's the artist's job to take us out of ourselves and into the other. One should come to a work of art nakedly, as you would to a new lover, and say, “Take me. Make me part of you.”

Was this your approach in writing A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain as well as They Whisper?

A Good Scent was really the book where I had to face down that inhibition that says, “I can’t go there.” I think that's best summed up in something that the great Japanese film director Akira Kurasawa said, that to be an artist means to never avert your eyes. And if anything has guided me, that's it. With A Good Scent I found myself in that place artists must go in their unconscious where, lo and behold, we are neither Vietnamese nor American, neither Catholic nor Buddhist, neither Israeli nor Palestinian. We are all deeply, universally human. There is a place where all of us meet and share a self. And that's the place I think that all artists strive to get to. When you get there, you find that then you can project that common pool of experience from yourself, through yourself, but also from everyone else and through them. You can project back into characters and situations that on the surface seem far from you in those limiting ways of gender and race and culture.

How essential is learning the language of another culture to this process of reaching that common pool of experience?

I did need, in terms of my Vietnamese, to spend a year knowing the language fluently and deeply submerged in the culture. I took every opportunity I could. For the seven months that I was in Saigon, for instance, I would go out virtually every night well past midnight and just wander the steamy back alleys, where nobody ever seemed to sleep, and I would crouch in the doorways with the Vietnamese people, who were as a group the warmest, most open and generous-spirited people in the world. And they would invariably invite me into their homes and into their culture and lives. And I fell in love more than several times in Vietnam. And I had a wide range of friendships, from my favorite leper beggar on the streets, who was by the way the most cheerful man I have ever met in my life, to the highest government officials.

And you fell in love with the entire fabric of their culture and lives and language?

I was ravished by the sensuality of Vietnam. Fluency in another language, to really know another language is not just to develop equivalencies for words. You rename the world. And the sensual properties of that name echo into the object and the object echoes into the words and so with that other language, I was seeing the world afresh. I needed that.

What has the response in the Vietnamese community been to A Good Scent?

The most common comment is that my understanding of the Vietnamese and their culture is so intimate they could have sworn that I was Vietnamese. In Orange County, California, home to eighty thousand Vietnamese—it's called “Little Saigon,” and is the de facto capital of the Vietnamese in America—a wonderful man who's translating my work into Vietnamese arranged a luncheon with a dozen of the most prominent literary figures in the Vietnamese community in America. The thing they were so deeply grateful to me for was not the cultural accuracy of the book but the fact that I had portrayed the Vietnamese people as universally human. In Vietnam itself, an official in the foreign ministry, a fast-track young Communist, discovered my book and has translated some of the stories into Vietnamese. He wanted to do “A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain,” as the title story, but his superiors did not find that story politically acceptable. He went on to translate “Crickets,” and his translation appeared in a weekly magazine in Saigon while I was there in’93 and caused quite a wonderful stir. Shopkeepers and cyclo drivers and so forth were stopping me on the street. “Crickets” has within it some pretty clear imagery. There are two types of crickets: the large charcoal crickets, which are big and strong but slow; and the smaller fire crickets that are quick and wily. Even when a child had his own charcoal cricket in a fight, everyone, even that child, would root for the little fire cricket. Who was who was pretty clear in the story. Every morning I passed a man who sold lapel pins within a block of my hotel. I spoke a greeting to him in Vietnamese; and he spoke back. We had a lovely sort of very warm, passing-hello relationship. This man was in his mid- to late forties. He had a horrible mangled stump where his left arm had been. On the day after “Crickets” appeared, he waved the magazine at me and called me over. It turns out that he is a former Vietcong soldier. We had a lovely chat and he went on about how much he loved all parts of the story. He says, “But you know what the best part was,” and he gave this great rich, deep laugh, “I used to fight crickets and what you say is true. When the fire cricket fought the charcoal crickets, we all rooted for the fire cricket.” Kind of an eerie moment. Here literary symbol meets object of the symbolism, and he was responding, not in any intellectual abstract way but directly and emotionally to this imagery.

Your stories seem to strike an accommodation between Buddhists and Catholics in Vietnam that I assume is reflected in Vietnamese life.

The Vietnamese are extraordinarily pragmatic and eclectic people. Everything you need to know about the Vietnamese people—their beliefs, their attitudes, their politics, their religion, their character—you can understand by learning how to cross the streets of Saigon. Those wonderful old wide French boulevards are filled at almost any hour of the day or night with ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five lanes of traffic in each direction. I say lanes but it's very amorphous. Virtually all of that traffic is motorcycles, motorbikes, bicycles, some cyclos—pedicabs, that is—a few taxicabs. To cross the streets in Saigon you stand on the corner and look across to the far side where you want to go. If you wait for an opening to get all the way across, you will die of old age on the curb. If you dash to an opening and wait and then dash to the next opening and so forth—you will die in the center of the street within seconds. In Saigon, what you do is this. You look to the left—the first small opening, you step into. And then you do not stop. You do not slow down. You continue to walk at a very moderate pace across the street toward the place you want to be. All those lanes of traffic bearing down on you will not stop, they will not slow down. But the vehicle that's about to strike you at any given second will at the last moment veer into the next lane. Without looking. Whoever is in that lane, understanding this process instinctively, moves into the next lane and so forth. You will continue to move through that traffic and it will ripple and flow around you until you are at the other side. If JFK had sent his chief of staff to Saigon in 1962 and said, “Learn how to cross the streets and tell me what you think,” that general would have learned two important things. First of all, we could never win the war. Second of all, we didn’t need to win the war, because as soon as the failures of the Communist system were clear to the Vietnamese, they would go around it—which is exactly what happened.

In many ways the title story of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain serves as a touchstone for the whole collection. Its function in the book echoes the structure of many of the individual stories: it makes you go back and think about the collection as a whole.

Yes, that story was written last, and it does indeed have a kind of overarching vision of life and the world and human aspiration and exile and choice of self that echoes through the whole collection. There's no question about that. John Clark Pratt did a very careful analysis of Good Scent in the Colorado Review last year. He sees it as a kind of quintessential postmodernist novel, working in montage. And I think he has got a point. Every story in the collection is carefully placed. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was consciously written at the end from a specific sensual inspiration, but it stands in the book as an overarching vision of the whole.

How did you decide to order the rest of the stories?

It was a deeply subjective thing. I was looking for a rhythm of tone, of emotion, of gender. I positioned the stories so that there would be a kind of waveform, of hope and despair and cynicism and aspiration and so forth. It was a way of modulating the rhythm of emotion through the whole mosaic of voices.

Certainly a story like “The Trip Back” is about the ways of memory. One of the first things the narrator says is, “I’m not a poet. I’m a businessman.” Yet it takes a poet to tell this story, and the coming to be a poet is tied in with memory and action.

There's a certain paradox, yes. The narrator definitely feels that failure in himself; his potential to be a poet is latent, and the action he takes at the end of the story is the consummate artistic gesture.

It says to his wife, “I’ll be your grandfather. I’ll be your brother, I’ll be your friend, your father, everything to you.” It's a great act of the imagination and it's also an embodiment of sensory memory.

Thanks. But part of me inevitably balks at analysis and generalization of that kind. We sit here to talk about the work like this, but ultimately the work is only itself. It is only the act. He puts his wife on his back and runs with her. The impulse to step back from it and say, “Ah, now he's telling her that he's everything to her” is a reductive act. When I teach literature we look at the subtext and articulate it in terms different from the terms in which they sit there on the page. But I always tell my students, “The only reason we are doing this terribly artificial thing is that the process may help you to thrum more completely or harmoniously with the next work of art that you read. In order to do that, when you leave here your last assignment is to forget everything we’ve said here.” To be a real reader means to close the book and sensually resonate to the vision of order there and be at peace with that. That's enough. That's everything.

Like many of the stories in the book, every detail in “Mr. Green” comes together and works perfectly with the ending. It answers the question “What then?” and also is a response to her grandfather's “Not possible” on so many levels. Every detail. What role does revision play in bringing everything to such a fine pitch?

There was very, very little revision in any of the stories. My editor did not change a comma in that book. I do not leave a sentence until it is as close to being finished as it can possibly be. I revise as I go, so there was, of course, revision from sentence to sentence, but there were no drafts of any story, nothing had to be pulled through the whole process again and again.

Do you ever have fun writing? Was “Love” in A Good Scent a fun story to write?

Of course it was fun, and parts of They Whisper were great fun. The Karen Granger stuff, the synthesized voice at the grocery store checkout counter, the handwriting on the girls’ rest room walls. There is actually quite a lot of humor in They Whisper and those things are fun to write. But there's a deeper fun, bound up with fear and trembling and pain. It's the deep satisfaction of going as far as you can into that utterly sensual unconscious and shaping it into a vivid and clear vision of the world. I walk away from my computer every day with an exhilaration. No matter how difficult, how troubling the vision is, the articulation of it is joyful.

I know that you have in your head right now several more books. Can you please tell us what that means?

My unconscious is telling me that if I sat down tomorrow and began to focus entirely on one of the four novels and two books of stories I have in mind, eighteen months from now it would have an existence. It's an accretion of sensual details and relationships and localities and characters who yearn. You drive down a street at night and you know everybody on the block in some way. All the picture windows are open and you look to the left and somebody's sitting at a table and somebody is just moving into the room with her hair up in a towel and her bathrobe on and he turns and looks over his shoulder. Over in this house there's a child climbing onto the back of a father and down at the next house something else. You know that all you need to do is stop your car and go knock on the door and they would let you in and you’d sit in there for a year and a half and walk out with everything. It's images. It's that sense of lives together in a place that you can access.

Now that a whole body of Vietnam War literature exists, is there anything productive to say about that literature and your place in it?

If one writes from the artistic impulse I’ve been describing, then to call me a Vietnam novelist is like calling Monet a lily-pad painter. Vietnam for me has always been simply a metaphor, a location, an instigator of action, a source of characters, a matrix of concrete sensual experience that holds the deep universal human issues I’m concerned with.

You’ve been quoted as saying that to avoid madness, you had to turn yourself into your writing pad or computer and write, not think about prizes and fame and glory. Now you’ve won the Pulitzer Prize and you’re one of the best-known writers in the country. I guess I would like to ask Mr. Green's question: “What then?”

The nice thing about the Pulitzer is that it will be there forever. I think the monkey's off my back now. I’m always the Pulitzer Prize winner now and it just makes it easier to write the books that I’m given to write. I was going to do that anyway, but the great and blessed difference is that people will actually buy the books and read them. I’ve always known that I would find a much wider audience someday. My books are devoted to the proposition that literary fiction does not need to disenfranchise itself from strong storytelling. Though the artist must focus ultimately on exploring and expressing his or her own deep vision of the world, the very act of expressing reveals a deep yearning to touch and to connect to others. It's also an act of lovemaking. When I write a book I am making myself naked to the world and saying I wish to touch you. I wish to connect deeply with you. The wonderful thing about the prize is that now others will respond.

Earlier we touched on the question of wanting to make the reader see your vision of the world. If you were backed to the wall and had to say, “This is my vision of the world,” what would you say?

The only true answer to that is to take my eight books and read them to you again. And then to read you every book I write from this point on. Ultimately, after all this talk, that is my vision of the world. It is irreducible.