Twenty years ago, you predicted that if you were to have a lasting impact on literature, it would be for "the more bizarre material that is natural to me." But your new novel, "San Miguel," is pretty conventional. Have you changed your mind?
Maybe. You want as an artist to be pushing yourself to do what you haven't done before. I had never done a conventional historical novel or anything entirely from the point of view of women. Early on my wife would criticize me because my women characters were barely existent. I pointed out to her that the male characters were barely existent, too. I was much more interested in wildness of design and language than characterization.
How's the book tour going?
Good, I'm feeling great because I get to go home today for a few days and clean up after my poor wife. She's been home alone for almost two weeks.
Presumably she's not letting the dishes pile up in the sink.
Well, yes, of course. She very rarely leaves the couch.
Are you kidding?
No, I'm not. We've been together since college, and we made a deal early on. I do 100 percent of everything. Her genius is that she isn't perfect so that I could be perfect. You have to take 90 percent of what I'm saying as tongue in cheek, but there is some serious thought behind it. Her part is technological, computers, math, all of that. That's how her brain works. I'm the singer, the dancer, the organizer and the cleaner. It's perfect.
You read everything to your wife. Do you think you would have been attracted to her had she aspired to be a writer?
Absolutely not. I can't fathom writers married to writers and musicians married to musicians. There's your enemy in bed beside you.
You've killed lots of people within your fiction. Do you ever imagine how your own death will go down?
Are you kidding me? Since the moment of consciousness hit, I've been death-obsessed. Who isn't?
Well, sure, but what does it look like?
We're in our latter phases of life, so we are holding on now for the great promise of the last two years of our lives having lost our minds, having angry immigrants change our diapers for us.
So just dying slowly? No getting hit by a meteor?
My dear fellow, we all put our heads down, don't we? In previous generations, there was purpose; you had to die, but there was God, and literature and culture would go on. Now, of course, there is no God, and our species is imminently doomed, so there is no purpose. We get up, raise families, have bank accounts, fix our teeth and everything else. But really, there is utterly no purpose except to be alive.
Imminently doomed? What sort of time frame are we talking?
In "A Friend of the Earth," I projected 2025 for the effects of global warming to really disturb us, but I should have cut that by 10 years. It's so depressing. You read any environmentalist — there's not a breath of hope for our species.
The first line of one of your stories reads, "So tell me, comrade, why do you wear your hair this way?" I'll pose the same question to you.
Well, I'm doing the best I can with what I've got. This is just who I am. Early on, I was on a book tour in Berkeley, where I have a lot of close friends. They loved me, everything is great, people hanging from the rafters, and just for fun, the eighth or ninth question I recognized one of my friends, and I said, "Yes, son, what's your question?" He said, "Well, I have two — how old are you really, and is your hair real?" A lot of those guys, they don't understand why they're not onstage instead of me.
You have written novels about Alfred C. Kinsey, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and Frank Lloyd Wright, all of whom you considered narcissists. Would people who know you consider you a narcissist?
That's for other people to say. Of course all novelists are egomaniacs and want to draw everyone to their fold just like any other preacher. The snake-oil peddler, the false prophet, all of this is fascinating to me. But I certainly hope that I'm more humane than that.
INTERVIEW HAS BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED.
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