[In the following interview, Brown discusses the thematic focus of and reasons behind her writing Before and After.]

“Before I answer your challenging questions,” writes Ms. Brown, “I need to try to explain a little my understanding of what I as a novelist am attempting to do. Many of your questions assume a prescriptive attitude on my part, an attitude of approval for the responses of my characters or for the outcomes of their actions. I, on the other hand, feel that my responsibility is to present a set of characters who act and respond realistically—whether I “approve” of what they do or say or think is quite beside the point. I know it's not quite the same because an actor doesn't originate the lines he or she says and thus bears no moral responsibility for them, but nonetheless I feel my role isn't that different from an actor's—I feel myself the vehicle, in a sense, for what I see as the plausible thoughts and actions of my characters, not their advocate. I'm not trying to shrug off responsibility; but I'm intent on representing people in all their complexity: their contradictions, their terrible secret thoughts and second thoughts, their confused hopes and foiled dreams. Their small heroisms, too; the valiant way they try their best by their own lights to do well by each other, themselves, the world. To try to represent only behavior of which I “approve” is a little like a psychiatrist telling a patient to feel free to say anything but at the same time be sure not to offend. …

It is important to understand this nonjudgmental approach I try for. I have never recommended that anyone imitate the way my characters walk through the world, any more than I think Chekhov (dare I invoke him in the same sentence with myself?) would suggest, say, that men ought to philander like the terrified, helpless, doomed suitor who falls in love with the lady with the lap dog.

I don't tend to try to create heroes and heroines. They are just people, and they do what they think they must do. I'd like my readers to try their own values alongside my characters' and think about how they might act in similar circumstances, and even perhaps judge them harshly, but I don't want to be responsible for, say, “exonerating” anyone for bad behavior or laying crowns of laurel on the heads of the virtuous. Those are the judgments we make from outside, from an objective distance, and we don't need writers to show us people's outsides; we can see those for ourselves. For me, the reason I write and read fiction is to feel what it is like to be someone else.”

[Seaquist]: The epigraph to Before and After is from Pascal: “When one does not love too much one does not love enough.” What does that mean to you? Could it be seen as a defense of unconditional love by any means?

[Brown]: The epigraph seems to me an infinitely interpretable Rorschach test, or better, a Moebius strip that turns in many directions even while you look at it. It invites speculation, contradiction, outrage. An epigraph is not necessarily a one-to-one representation of what an author thinks or believes. It is meant to be a clue to the mysteries of emotion that follow, possibly an incitement to the reader to take care where she or he walks. It suggests the shape of the territory, the color of the sky that will hang over the whole. It is not a needlepoint motto to hang on the kitchen wall.

Your focus is on the family of the perpetrator, a relatively novel focus in fiction. A drawback of that focus is that we never hear from the victim or her family, nor are they invoked in any depth by the Reisers themselves, who, agonizing over Jacob, don't direct much of that agony outward. You opted against the Taverners' voice because it would be “predictable,” but Martha's view certainly would not be predictable. The most powerful element in Joyce Carol Oates's Black Water is the voice of the drowning woman. Did you consider including Martha's voice?

First, quite simply, you can't do everything in one book. Perhaps a more ambitious novelist could, but the scale of this book always seemed to me small, intimate, even while I hoped I could suggest some of the consequences of, say, class differences or legal fictions. I wanted to keep my focus narrowly on the least likely and perhaps least predictable players in this drama. What could Martha have given us? Plenty, of course, but very different sorts of things than the astonished, injured innocence—deserved or not—of the victimizer's family. Furthermore, there are some things that seem easier, some that seem harder—I mean harder as in hard-as-a-rock, I mean easier as in softer, more yielding—than others. In this book, Martha would have said the expected things, the victim's terrible words, just as, in Tender Mercies, the quadriplegic Laura would have been a sentimental reporter of her own atrocious situation: How could she not have been? Someone else has to try to cope with it, someone less predictably embittered—not the robbed but the robber.

For the Reisers, especially the father, Ben, love is not only blind but blinding. They “see” neither the dead girl nor Jacob's volcanic anger (it wasn't a freak blow that killed her; he bludgeoned her to death). What if there had been an eyewitness with a video camera: Would that bring the Reisers to a recognition? Force Ben to connect Jacob's anger with his own?

Carolyn's having seen Martha's body still warm, as it were, may play a part in her harsher judgment of her son and his actions, or at least in her more profound sympathy with the girl and her parents. Nonetheless: there are no witnesses with video cameras in our worst moments; not usually. So Ben is left to reconstruct what he needs to believe, just as Jacob, in reporting that if he hadn't “happened” to land his blow Martha would have been alive in school the next day, either lies to protect himself or denies, sincerely, a reality too difficult to accept. What would the objective report of a video camera—an unlikely assurer of “the truth”—have given us? The only “reality” the Reisers have to deal with is the one they can and must create for themselves (which, of course, is why Jacob never has his own sections while everyone else does). Each envisions a different scene, “connects” differently with the moment and the significance of Martha's death, although it could be argued that even if they all saw the same scene, they might still come to the same conviction of what they have to do. We will never know exactly what happened out there in the snow any more than they do—why should we?

Judith is the novel's strongest moral voice, a voice dismissed, however, because of her youth. Judith is repelled by her father's falsifying of Jacob's defense, and she confronts her mother with the key question her parents should but don't raise: “What if I was the one who somebody killed?” We can conjecture how in this family Jacob lost his moral bearings, but how did Judith gain hers? What does it mean that the moral voice is given to a 12-year-old? Does Jacob feel more remorse than he shows?

Judith's voice is dismissed, at least temporarily, because her youth will not even entertain the finer inflections that age reluctantly discerns; she is absolute in her judgments in a world that conducts itself by relative—some might say merciful—rule. Her mother, however, though she tries that argument for a while, does not ultimately dismiss her; she does exactly what Judith hopes she will do, she repudiates such relativism. Or, we might say, she introduces a different kind of relativism: The harder Ben pulls on the rope that ties her to Jacob, the harder she feels the pull of the Taverners' love for their daughter. There is no monolithic family here that has caused Jacob to lose his moral bearings. Please don't forget that these parents painfully divide over their responsibility. That it's hard for Carolyn to do this shouldn't be surprising: She loves her son and she wants to protect him, until that protection finally seems too selfish and insular to be borne. As for Jacob, I suspect he does feel more remorse than he shows; I don't think it's easy for a boy who's done something as awful as this to melt safely; I think he has learned a kind of control that's self-punishing and brutally silent. When Ben asks him how he likes the lie they've told the lawyer, Jacob tells his father, or tries to, that the lie is “your story.” When Ben denounces Carolyn for “selling out” to the grand jury, Jacob understands and does not blame her. The hung jury is not necessarily a favor to him. Otherwise, why would he be—essentially—unmanned at the end, reduced, far from the boy he had been, and possibly never to become it, forever?

With the parents in Before and After, you diverge from a standard stereotype: It's the father who's the protective parent and the mother who's the truth-seeker. How did you decide on this dichotomy?

With much difficulty. This is going to simplify things immensely, because your impulses as a writer are always very overdetermined, but I wanted to cut across stereotypes. I think the assumption tends to be, and I don't agree with it, that it's the mother who will put her arms around this boy and protect him come hell or high water, and it's the father who might be the one who says, as a father I spoke to recently said, “Well, if he's guilty, he goes to jail. Is there a question?” And I said, “Well, there seemed to be questions from many people who read the book.” In reality, the responses have been split, not at all along gender lines. I wanted to represent a nurturant father, a man who not only stays home and cooks but someone who is impulsive, which causes him problems. He's not a paragon. And I don't think Carolyn is not nurturant. She's a doctor and she's given her life over to the protection of children. She is not isolated in herself the way the artist might be.

And the end Carolyn wrangles this thing through and decides finally that she owes something to the murdered girl, her parents, this sense of law, but that's too abstract. Mostly, she says to Ben, “The more you tell me you love your son, the tighter that string pulls in the other direction, and I know that they love their daughter too. And somebody has to represent her in the world.” That's justice, but I wouldn't call it that, it sounds like it has a capital J. It really means feeling for something outside your own family. I didn't think this book was political when I wrote it, but it's been borne in on me that when you ask the questions—“Do you just protect your own no matter what? Or are there other people in the world who are owed protection, repentance, reparations?”—then it becomes political, even though it's extraordinarily intimate. At a staged reading [the novel was begun as a play], a director said (I thought quite obtusely), “Well, you know, this should've taken place in the station house, what's it doing in the kitchen?” This book starts in the house, not in the station house. There isn't a trial scene in this book. I'm not interested in that kind of event. I'm interested in aftermaths of events, and I'm interested in what events feel like, maybe, but I'm not interested in the events themselves. For that you have to go to an action novelist, and that's not the way I see myself.

As Jacob's protector, Ben argues a philosophy inherited from his own father: “Out there in the enemy world, it was the most basic point of pride … to be my shield and my defender”; it was at home that the child was dealt with. In the novel, Ben's philosophy “wins”: His strategy results in a hung jury permitting Jacob to go free, although, home again, Jacob and his anger are not dealt with. Couldn't this philosophy, which makes the family the final moral arbiter beyond law or state, also exonerate the actions of, say, a KKK family?

Ben's philosophy “wins,” in the technical sense: Jacob is not convicted. What happens to him, however, is not that simple. Why assume the author of the book is plumping for this outcome, applauding Ben's clever strategy, his good lawyer, his manipulation of that which can be manipulated to save his son's life? Then again, why not assume it? Better yet, why not see these as plausible alternatives that grow out of different interpretations of the facts? Ben does not see Jacob as—to use Judith's word—as “pathological,” nor have he and Carolyn seen much behavior that looks particularly “sick.” (A few readers have asked why he wasn't in therapy, why they weren't braced for the worst.) But they haven't been privy to much suspicious behavior. Judith has had most of that evidence, and she's a child who doesn't know what to do with it; she loves him—he can be a very good brother. Jacob doesn't, in truth, look much more dangerous than many teenage boys. Nor does his anger seem that unusual, especially when it's elicited by a dressing-down by his father at three in the morning. As for the murder itself: In many of my books, character and circumstance meet and the outcome is catastrophe. But that doesn't mean that things must happen as they do: I don't believe that Jacob, who murders, is “a murderer.” I'm not sure I could have written about a boy who goes out one day expecting to kill someone, who plans, who expects, who hopes to kill. What happens when he's pushed hard in a tender place, “the terrible means at hand,” (Ben's words) is much more like our own daily lives: We are not so much criminal as we are vulnerable, and, after the fact, frightened and sometimes dangerously foolish. There's an important difference.

One of the things I wanted to be clear about is this: Parents' responsibility for their children's characters, personalities, and actions is much more complex than we tend to admit after a terrible deed is done. Even Carolyn exonerates Ben from blame: He has tried in good faith to deal with his anger, he has been in therapy, he has attempted to control it and failed, as many of us similarly fail to be exemplary parents, spouses, individuals. But “children taste what their parents swallow,” she says sadly, and that's about all that can be said on the subject of what a hapless parent is to do who hasn't beaten his own neuroses. It is too easy to convict after the fact, and much too harsh to blame a child's imperfections on his parents' imperfections, which perhaps go back to their parents' imperfections, and on and on. Children are so sensitive they can pick up a whiff of every tension, every conflict, and what causes more tension than the suppression “for the sake of the children”—the best we can often do—of our worst characteristics?

In the epilogue, five years later, we learn that the Reisers are still married, despite Carolyn's “treachery” of testifying against Jacob and despite Carolyn and Ben not speaking for months afterwards. Better marriages have foundered on less. While writing, what odds did you give them of staying together?

I didn't know till I got there. I gave no odds. In the end I believe they recognized the love they bore their son (not to mention each other). If there is one absolute in the book, that love is it.

The novel leaves many readers sad: There is no justice, and the mystery at the core of family—how little we know of those we love—is deepened at the book's end, not reduced. As Judith says about Jacob, “We don't talk much these days about anything except things that don't mean much to either of us.” Do the Reisers have enough to sustain themselves in the years to come? Do the Taverners? Is this mystery about family inevitable?

Mystery—yes, that, I think, is inevitable. Shipwreck is not inevitable, but only with luck does one escape it. I'm not the first to say that luck is indifferent. (And as for shipwreck, one of my favorite authors, William Maxwell, in one of my favorite books, So Long, See You Tomorrow, a very sad novel, quotes Ortega y Gasset: “Life is, in itself and forever, shipwreck.” If you think I'm gloomy.) Character may predispose some people to mischief or worse, but sometimes even the most problematic people die in bed without having seriously harmed a soul. If the Reisers have enough to sustain them, it will be because of their (anyone's) unquenchable—undrownable is a better metaphor, given the image of shipwreck—resilience. Thus, Carolyn thinks guiltily, they are stuck with joy: As long as they live they are stuck with the privileges of life. As for the Taverners, yes, they will survive because they are, by virtue of the harder life they've always lived, tough and unyielding. I don't want to sentimentalize them, but I see them as angry, shored up almost tribally by family, and not as surprised by what has happened as Ben and Carolyn, who have never expected themselves to be hurt, let alone to be at the giving end of pain.

You talk about adversity, “before and after.” Do you think it takes trauma as a catalyst to help you crystallize values?

I don't think it does, and to be perfectly honest, I wish I could write without that jump start that I get from these exorbitant actions. My short stories don't start that way, they don't have huge events in them. But the novels—somehow, I do exactly what you're suggesting. To be perfectly frank, I think I overwork it a little bit. I'd love it if my next book could be as quiet as, say, a Eudora Welty book. But that doesn't seem to be the way my imagination works. And at the moment, I'm stuck with what I have.

What would be your advice to the screenwriter or producer of the film version of Before and After?

Don't make this a violent movie. It is not about action but about responses. If there's any blood, it should be over with in the first scene (and then, as in the novel, reappear briefly, and reticently, in the account of the murder). Like Ben, I don't believe in reality much; I believe more in the imagination. Reality, for better or worse, as the Reisers discover, intrudes, but I hope the filmmakers will respect the fact that more of this novel takes place in meditation than it does in violence, and though I know that film and theater take place before our eyes, I'd like to hope the film can retain some of the tone of hesitation, confused response, retraction, and the sense that, much of the time, this family is sinking under ennui and enervation even as their fate hurtles along out of control.

The person who is doing the screenplay is Ted Tally, who wrote The Silence of the Lambs. God knows what gruesomeness he may dream up. The director is Barbet Schroeder, who did Reversal of Fortune. Schroeder has a fairly kinky mind, and I have no idea what he would do if he really got hold of this thing. Robert DeNiro has apparently been reading the book. I don't know if he really is thinking of playing Ben; I can't quite see it. This is absurd, you understand, having a movie of your book cast. I will say, though, that Meryl Streep is a pretty terrific candidate for Carolyn, because she feels like this woman, in my mind. She's a good-looking, tall, blond woman, but she's kind of single-minded. She has that intelligence that Streep has. But who knows? I don't trust Hollywood.

In an interview you said that you had a “persistent itch of alienation.” Are you a 20th-century alienated writer, whose books are to entertain us with this descriptive alienated writing, or are you a 19th-century writer with a fable, a morality tale? Do you intend to instruct?

I would have to accept your assumptions in order to answer your question, and I don't accept them. But I'll try to answer what may be the essence of your question, which comes down to “Am I attempting to entertain or instruct?” and then you can choose whichever century you'd put those intentions into. I don't like novels that instruct as such. I don't think fiction belongs in the “how to” section. I once had a really interesting experience when my first novel, The Autobiography of My Mother, which is about a lawyer and her alienated, withered flower-child daughter, had just been published. And I should say, by the way, the mother is in many ways an anti-heroine; she's a very difficult character, not pleasant. And I went to dinner with a friend who'd brought along a recent graduate of Harvard Law School. And in the course of the conversation it emerged to her astonishment that I had written this novel, which she either had read or had heard about, and I saw her face fall. She said, “You wrote The Autobiography of My Mother”? And I said, “I can see you didn't like it.” And she said, “Well, I have to admit, not really. I just graduated from Harvard Law School and you didn't tell me how to live my life.” And I said, “You're damn right I didn't tell you how to live your life. If I told you anything in this book, it was maybe how not to live your life, or how living your life is going to be very complicated.”

What I think we can get out of novels is some kind of illumination of other people's lives that casts some light on our own. If you look at the best of those 19th-century novels, at George Eliot or Jane Austen, in fact there is so much more going on than moralizing, even while they're able to deliver themselves of these grand sentences in which they seem to be telling you truths. Those truths are very complicated and they're undercut by all sorts of circumstances and ironies. And there's plenty of alienation in them, believe me. I think there are very few writers who don't consider themselves in some way alienated. I don't look at that as fashionable, I just look at it as human. Few of us are wholly comfortable in our lives. I will say that I've sometimes felt my kind of writing isn't all that fashionable these days because of the tendency of 19th-century sentences to crop up. Those sentences are out of fashion to some extent these days—maximalist sentences in a minimalist time—although I hope they come back in. My last novel, Civil Wars, was reviewed by Lynne Sharon Schwartz in the New York Times. She said, “I took your book because I write 19th-century novels and you write 19th-century novels, and I thought we'd better stick together.”

Why did you set Before and After in a small town?

Because everyone is eternally there. At the end of the book this family moves to Houston. They move there because it's a place that doesn't care what you've done in your past. Basically cities are anonymous places. But this had to be written about a place where your family is known, you're even held responsible for things that were done generations ago. The book is set in a real place; it's just that none of it ever happened.

Are you interested in writing about people who live in large cities?

Yes, as a matter of fact, Street Games, my first book of fiction, has just been reissued in a beautiful edition by Milkweed. It's about a transitional neighborhood in Brooklyn. Place has played a tremendous part in all my writing. I'm trying to work out my own lack of a particularly grounded childhood by writing about other people's movement to places where they don't belong. Only one book besides Street Games is set in a place where someone belonged, and that's Cora—my favorite of my books. It's 84 poems that make a story spoken by a woman in New Hampshire who is stuck in the little town that she grew up in. I wanted to see what that would feel like. The book begins with a tiny three-line poem in which she says, “I want to understand light years / I live in Oxford, New Hampshire / When, then, will the light get to me?” And that begins an attempt to find a larger world. She gives up and comes back home.

How distant are you from Before and After right now? You obviously enjoy reading from it. Are you rediscovering your novel?

I do sometimes, although to be honest, at this point I've read it pretty often. I read the opening part frequently before the book was finished. It was fun to take questions then, because I was really asking the audience for advice. I learned things from people and they asked good questions. Now of course it's fixed.

All I want for a book is that people that I respect will respect it. A little money on the side doesn't hurt, but that's certainly not why I write. If that was what was on my mind, I could have come up with a much better profession by now! Even interesting criticism gets more enlightening than more praise, in a funny way.

One of the most wonderful things for me is to discover all the book clubs who keep your books alive. I have met more book clubs than I can number on both hands who have read Civil Wars.

As a writer, the most exciting moment I ever had was not watching someone buy my book. I was in the Boston Public Library once, and I was down looking at the bottom shelf, and someone was reaching for Tender Mercies up on the top shelf. She took it down, and I watched her look at it and turn it over and thumb through it, and I said, “Will she? Won't she?” She put it in her arm and walked away. I didn't announce myself to her. It didn't have anything to do with “Hey, I wrote that book.” A writer wants to give back something of what she's taken. I've read all my life with great excitement, and all I've wanted to do as a writer was replenish that.