SOURCE: Thiebaux, Marcelle. “Susan Minot: Understatement is the Novelist's Preference, in Her Writing as Well as in Her Conversation.” Publishers Weekly 239, no. 50 (16 November 1992): 42–43.

[In the following essay, Thiebaux provides an overview of Minot's life and work, based on an interview with Minot upon the publication of Folly.]

Understatement is the novelist's preference, in her writing as well as in her conversation

Susan Minot meets PW in a friend's apartment in Greenwich Village while her own newly purchased condo, directly overhead, is being renovated. “It's completely gutted,” she remarks cheerily, oblivious of the wild clatter outside the open windows—Sixth Avenue, too, is being ripped apart.

A seasoned interviewee who has been profiled in Mademoiselle, W, and New York magazine, Minot is relaxed and breezy. “They're not even always accurate,” she exclaims about the other interviews. “I should correct that little press kit. For one thing, Minot doesn't sound like ‘Why not.’ It rhymes with ‘Sign it!’” About being interviewed, she says with a grin, “The less said the better as far as I'm concerned … about anything.” Coming from a writer who pares her prose to the terse minimum, the statement has its own logic. Minot pulls up a big chair for PW and gets positioned in another. We sip cranberry juice.

Her second novel, Folly (after the highly praised Monkeys and the collection Lust and Other Stories) is just out from Seymour Lawrence/Houghton Mifflin. Beginning during WWI, it focuses on a prim upper-class Boston milieu. “It's a world I always resisted,” she explains, “which is why I wanted to see how it worked in a novel. Yes, I know something of that world,” she says, modestly gliding over her patrician family background. “I actually am not a moneyed person, I don't ‘have money.’ The money I have, I've made. And yet I went to private schools [including posh Concord Academy], so I never lacked for it. But there are different degrees.”

At age 34, Minot looks a lot sunnier and blonder than the gravely wistful author photographed in 1986 and 1989 for the jackets of Monkeys and Lust. Her lively urbanity doesn't jibe with the depressed young women populating the stories in Lust, willing doormats to men who are cads and rats. Nor would Minot make you think of the martyred Lilian Eliot, Folly's heroine, who slavishly adores a man after he uses her casually and chiefly ignores her. And yet, Minot insists, “I identify with her. I identify with folly, foolishness.” Of Lilian's marriage to the lugubrious Gilbert Finch, Minot says, “He's placid, he's safe. Safe is maybe what she can manage. She's accepting a degree of unhappiness. There's some folly in there, and maybe there's some bravery.”

Like Lilian in the novel, Minot is a painter. “I do watercolors in a decorative way. When I'm on a trip I'll do little scenes and decorate my letters.” But painting and writing differ. “A writer is more like a spy.” In gathering material for her fiction, she suspects “people think I do spy.” But her real material for her characters is “interior. They are fragments of myself. I could say they're all me, really.”

Asked about Lilian Eliot's apparent sexual repression, Minot counters, “There's a lot of sexuality in Lilian. It's not expressed. It's channeled into this obsession with Walter, carrying this torch for the first man that stirred her. A lot of her energy goes into that. They're sloshing around in her, these yearnings she has, but there's nowhere for her to express them, except in ardor for this man who's not there.” Minot agrees that sex is “a major motivation. It's much more of a concern than what finally gets down on the page.” Could a writer, too, forget or sublimate her sexuality if she got totally involved in her art? “Would that that were true!” Minot murmurs, with a smile.

Her decision to set the story in an earlier period came from a desire “to focus on a woman's experience, to see how much society's expectations determine how one lives one's life. I was interested in what the experience of a woman in another time would have been—with the addition of some kind of modern consciousness. I think that a lot of Lilian's dilemmas are those one can relate to today.”

Minot achieves her understated style with effort. “It's like boiling down. Four pages can go through six, eight, 10 drafts to get down. The beginning is always rewritten much more than the rest, because it's the setting up of information as well as the telling of the story—that's always much harder to juggle.”

She likes to elicit friends' opinions while she's writing, a practice hinted at by the acknowledgements page of Folly, which lists a roster of colleagues. “I show them different parts, and I'll get some reaction. Even sometimes before they've said a word something will suddenly be clear to me, when before I'd been muddling through. The fact that some other eyes are on it and I can say”—Minot raises her hands in a pushing-away gesture—“‘I've thought this. Say no more!’ Just the fact that it's getting an objective look helps me get a different slant on it. And some people gave me very good suggestions. I was having a hard time at the beginning, and someone who read it suggested I start in a place that was then much further along in the book, and have it be a flashback.”

Among the people she thanks, Georges Borchardt has been Minot's agent from the start. “I couldn't be happier.” Borchardt is a firm ally, especially “if there's any danger I might get to be nervous about things.” Another is writer Nancy Lemann, to whom Folly is dedicated. “She's an old friend of mine from college”—Brown University, that is, where Minot studied writing with R. V. Cassill. “We've always commiserated with each other. She's very encouraging. She dedicated her first novel to me, Lives of the Saint. While I was writing Folly, I had a kind of contentious relationship with the material. I'd fret, who's going to be interested in reading this—tea parties in Boston? And she'd always say, ‘Oh, I would!’”

Minot corresponds with another friend, Darryl Pinckney, author of High Cotton. “He's a wonderful letter writer. He won't just say, ‘Oh, I liked it,’ but will give a good literary reading. He recommended different Boston novels, helped stir my mind, novelists like Henry James, [James] Fenimore Cooper, William Dean Howells. They explore this same territory, so I checked them out a bit. I had never read [John P. Marquand's] The Late George Apley, and I started to read that and I got about 10 pages into it and I though, this is too much the material that I'm trying to write about, so I put it down.”

The legendary Seymour Lawrence is Minot's editor and mentor. “He looks after his authors very well. I met him through an editor, a mutual friend of ours, at a reading in New York when I was at Columbia. I was in my last semester in the writing program there. I was introduced to Sam as someone who had just sold her first story to the New Yorker, and he said, ‘I'd like to see some of your stuff.’ I sent him that story and two others which happened to be about the Vincent family [the characters in Monkeys], and he offered me a contract.”

Lawrence, who is well known in the industry for discovering and nurturing young writers, remembers that he “saw unmistakable talent” in those pieces. “Joe Kanon was then president of Dutton, and I think it was the quickest contract we ever signed. We were so excited about her as a talent. If Monkeys was her debut and also announced her arrival as a young star, Folly marks her achievement as a maturing artist,” Lawrence says.

In the acknowledgements, Minot also thanks Ben Sonnenberg, former editor of Grand Street. The citation reads: “I don't know what I'd do without him.” “Ben Sonnenberg is my editor, too. I have two editors on this book,” Minot say equably. The five-part structure in Folly “was Ben's suggestion, which was really right. As I was structuring the novel, it made sense to divide it into those sections. And to name each section after one of the characters. There is that added glaze over it, that implies that these people all influence one another.”

Reviewers and readers received Lust less enthusiastically than Monkeys, with some male readers, in particular, getting huffy at Minot's portrayal of callous men. While Minot agrees that women are more likely to be interested in her work, she says she'd “like to write books that men would like to read—I'm not trying to speak only to women.” Her extensive attention from the media came not after the acclaimed Monkeys but along with the mixed reviews of Lust. “Those were all Lust profiles,” she says of the magazine articles about her. “When Monkeys came out, I really didn't do any promotion. Monkeys made a splash because it was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. That got it a lot of attention, so when I was doing the promotion for Lust I felt a little more secure about having interviews. There were a lot of questions about Monkeys, since I hadn't talked about it before.”

Asked about the cooler responses to Lust, Minot demurs. “It's actually getting a reputation now. There were more good reviews than bad. But no review has ever been a surprise to me. The good ones actually may be a surprise. But the bad ones—it's never something that hasn't occurred to me already.” She laughs. “I'm afraid that they will spot every weakness. Or I imagine how something could be taken a different way.”

Monkeys received the Prix Femina Etranger and has been optioned for a film. “Someone else wrote the screenplay for it and the options ran out, so I've since thought of doing the screenplay myself. I would never have felt confident enough to do that before, when it was my only material. Still, when I start talking about it, the material I know so well, letting it go out into the collaborative world of film is a little nerve-wracking. Studio films are not so interesting to me as small, low-budget movies, movies that don't show off a lot of money. But you know movie talk … it can go on for years.”

Meanwhile, there are fresh ventures. her next project will depend on “what else is going on in my life. I have a number of stories in various stages of disrepair that I can work on. It helps when I get back into a routine.” Her next work of fiction, a novella called Evening, has a contemporary setting. She's integrating into it a scene she had written for Folly and later removed, about a woman on her deathbed. “It has to do with her memories and also with her relationship with her nurse, the woman who's looking after her.”

When she's in her routine, Minot writes every day, all day, five days a week. “I usually go to my office at about 10, 10:30 till about 6, except maybe for lunch or to work out. I have had an office. In the new apartment I won't but I have one now in TriBeCa, just a room.” She exercises “either at lunchtime or the end of the day.” In a white short-sleeved leotard top and flaring black silk pants, Minot is lithe as a dancer. Red-nailed toes emerge from the black suede slingback sandals. “I work out three or four times a week. Or I run.” She hugs one pure black silky cat, while the other makes friends with PW and rattles in the wads of brown wrapping paper on the floor. “Otherwise I do not move. I'm just sitting there all day long.”

Minot says she has thought of experimenting with other genres—plays or original screenplays. “I've been discussing some screenplay things with friends of mine who are independent producers,” though “not at this point” with filmmaker husband Davis McHenry whom she married in 1989 and who also gets a graceful mention in the acknowledgements. Minot admits that the two of them have since separated. Has that experience made its way into her writing? “Um, no! It's the simplest answer to that question!”

She's not sure how she feels about her forthcoming evening reading November 24 at Limbo on Avenue A on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. “I'm going to be doing a lot of reading in bookstores, since I'm about to go on tour for the book. I have mixed feelings [about reading] my work. Sometimes I feel better about my work than I do at others, and when I feel better about it I'm happy to read.” She imagines asking an audience, “Do you really want to hear this? Maybe it's not important enough.’”

Susan Minot's preferred subject matter isn't hard to discern. She admits that although “there are marriages in Folly where people are happy together, those are not the ones that I'm exploring.” She laughs as she observes, “There's more fictional material in unhappiness and disappointment and frustration than there is in happiness. Who was it [that] said, ‘Happiness is like a blank page?’”