The Lipman-Kadish Letters
By ELINOR LIPMAN AND RACHEL KADISH
Class: We have two terrific writers speaking to you—well, to each other—today. Our first guest is Elinor Lipman, author of My Latest Grievance, a novel about Frederica Hatch, whose professor-parents do a number on their daughter. Then we have Rachel Kadish, whose Tolstoy Liedgives us Tracy Farber, an untenured academic whose adventures in love and in the English Department are making readers all over the country flipping pages like mad. Scroll down to eavesdrop on their lively, literary conversation.
Dear Elinor,
So here we go… it’s good to “meet” you via correspondence, after not only reading your delightful novel but also hearing your name from our mutual editor this past year.
I had such fun reading My Latest Grievance, and here’s why. Yes, it’s hilarious: the absurdities of raising a child in a dorm… the frustrations of living under “the most annoyingly evenhanded parental team in the history of civilization”… all that theorizing while the characters play the emotional equivalent of a game of Twister… all Frederica’s brilliant zingers about academic culture and agnostic human secularists… But many writers would stop there. What I like the most is that even though it’s easy to mock Frederica’s parents, I feel you admire them too. Yes, they are too progressive to tell their daughter to put on her winter coat; yes, they answer every question with a question and turn nearly every conversation into a Teachable Moment or a pro-union speech a la power to our oppressed sisters toiling in the bowls of the rich.
But!
But they’re human. And they’re trying to do something right, and in the end they seem, at least to me, remarkably resilient.
I love that you didn’t just parody them. If I have one beef with much of contemporary writing, it’s that authors seem to find it easiest to parody people, and stop at that. Maybe it’s part of what’s afoot in our culture right now—a lack of true human contact, a sense that we’re often more comfortable instant messaging than sitting face to face? Or maybe it’s not that—maybe it’s simply always been easier to write beautiful prose that reduces people to ideas or behavioral tics than to really grant them their full humanity.
Anyway. I love that you showed Frederica’s and her parents’ flaws, and let them still be… not larger than life, but as big as life. Which is plenty big.
Rachel
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Dear Rachel,
Our readers will have to indulge us a few volleys of compliments because I adored Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story. First, thank you for your kind words about My Latest Grievance. I’ll get to your comments about my characters, but first I have to rave for a few sentences about yours, and if I didn’t abhor the phrase “back at you,” I might be tempted to type it. I was utterly in the thrall of your narrator, by her dilemmas—not one but two will-she-or-won’t-she drumbeats captivating me throughout—and further stirred and agitated (in the best sense) by the ivory tower politics. Tracy Farber’s tribulations felt so authentically ulcer-inducing in the academic-departmental sense that very early on I recognized that I had a tenure page-turner in my hands. But most of all, the writing is truly, exceptionally wonderful. I slog through a lot of novels before I find one—if ever—that is both profound and delightful. Brilliant yet accessible also applies. Quite a feat. And one more thing: I felt that every single encounter and exchange among your characters was emotionally authentic, which to me is a very big deal. I hate to stop mid-sentence and say, “Oh, come on. Who would do/say that?”
Okay; now I’m supposed to address what you said about my latest....
I confess that I may not have set out to treat my narrator’s parents and their three hats (faculty, dorm parents, and union activists) with all the humanity you credit me with. In general, I can’t resist taking a few potshots at earnestness, and no characters of mine have ever been this earnest. But along the way, something shifted, and I grew fonder and fonder of them, and I appreciated them more and more—not unlike what my teenage narrator was experiencing. About half-way through the writing, I realized that this was really a love story about a family, and that either David or Aviva or both were going to be its heroes. But, I am guilty of a little parodying...
Elinor