Book tours have changed for authors. There are
fewer bookshop signings, fewer bookshops and more literary festivals. Amy Bloom spent her first day in Ireland reading at the Electric Picnic. “It was a very benign rock festival. There were so many babies in strollers. You did not feel that Mick Jagger was about to leap into the crowd and the Hells Angels were about to stab somebody.”
The American author was, she said, “as happy as Larry”. “If you get to choose, do you want to hang with 40,000 people and a lot of cases of beer and lads or do you want to go and sit at that desk in that sad little bookstore where nobody talks to you? It’s a tough call.”
As in her fiction, there’s a contained humour in much of what Bloom says, in her dry, sardonic detached tone. There are few clues, not even a raised eye brow, that she’s cracking a joke.
Bloom, a New York-born author, now living in Connecticut, is in the middle of what sounds like a gruelling book tour – up and down the east and west coasts of America and through the middle, then Europe – London, Paris, Amsterdam, Laois and Dublin.
Brushing off suggestions that it’s a tough gig, she says drily: “Whatever kind of unseemly handwringing one might do about a book tour, it is, after all, a very cushy thing.”
Having to sit on a stage at festivals and perform, though, is surely more of a challenge than scribbling a name on a flyleaf cover?
“Anytime you take a writer out of their house there’s some pressure that they should be performing. Most of us are not made for this type of activity. There’s a good reason we work by ourselves and sit around in our pyjamas drinking coffee and that’s because we’re not really fit for public consumption.”
In these straitened times for publishers, Bloom's grand tour shows just how much faith they have in Lucky Us, her new, entirely enthralling, difficult-to-pigeonhole novel. Published in the US in late July, its glowing reviews include the New York Times which said: "She writes sharp, sparsely beautiful scenes that excitingly defy expectation and part of the pleasure of reading her is simply keeping up with her."
And the Washington Post – a paper not usually given to hyperbole, said, "If America has a Victor Hugo, it is Amy Bloom."
Lucky Us opens with two killer lines, typical of Bloom's startling economy with words and faculty in scene setting: "My father's wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us."
The voice belongs 12-year-old Eva Logan, a bookish girl who her mother quickly abandons in the home of that recently-bereaved father, Edgar. He’s a shady professor of English (with no apparent qualifications), living with his teenage daughter Iris, a would-be starlet biding her time before she can kick the midwest dust off her feet.
The two girls head for the bright lights of Hollywood, but Iris’s career in the movies soon falters when she falls in love with a leading lady and a (deliciously described) scandal ensues and she is blacklisted.
The half-sisters cross the country again, this time for a new life in New York with a newly down-on-his-luck Edgar and Franciso, their flamboyant make-up artist friend.
Over the course of the novel, which spans the years of the second World War, the four invent themselves many times over, with their story told mostly in Eva’s detached, cool voice, or through letters – some received, some not, a crucial plot device – from Iris who ends up in London and from family friend Gus, imprisoned under the Aliens Act in Germany.
To fill in any more details would be to give away the plot, which flows like mercury, creating a vivid picture of rootlessness fuelled by war-time uncertainty and personal ambition.
The cast of characters, which grows as the novel goes on, believes not only that you make your own luck, but that you make yourself.
Everyone in Lucky Us is fuelled by a sort of contagious optimism. No matter what happens – and amid the humour there is considerable bleakness – they all simply accept it.
“That acceptance is one of the qualities I admire about Eva,” says Bloom, while Iris, she says, is a “monster”.
Transformation is a very American theme but Bloom argues that while that is certainly true – “It is particularly American, that’s part of our charm” – everyone is transformed in some way. “It’s the human condition,” she says.
“Most of us in any country have a series of reinventions. You’re a little kid. You’re a big kid. You marry, to go from being a single to a married person with children. You don’t call that a reinvention? If that’s not a reinvention I don’t know what it is.”
Bloom’s own professional life has taken a path marked by transformation. Her first novel was published when she was 40 – she’s 61 now. At the time, she was working as a social worker, and she wrote “late at night until early morning, five nights a week”. She later became a psychotherapist and practised until 2002.
That training may help to account for her ability to answer a question with carefully chosen words and stop when she’s made her point – an enviable quality to those of us who tend to babble on, to fill silences. She mentions her three grown-up children, but deflects questions about them. She has, she said, kept them out of her writing, but they read her work and like it and she’s pleased by that.
Authors don't chose book covers but the difference between the US and UK editions of Lucky Us is, as Bloom says, "remarkable". The one for this market features a beautiful, moody black-and-white image of two women's faces.
It looks intimate and dreamy. Bloom describes the picture as looking “fraught”. It appears to be packaged as women’s literary fiction: a dead cert for book clubs throughout the winter (and it should be – there’s much to discuss).
The US edition is an illustration of a lion, a zebra, a bird and a tightrope – a cover for a colourful fable.
Is Lucky Us a fable? Is it not what it seems on first reading, a multilayered story with a vivid narrative of what might have happened to two young women in those confusing war years? "The US cover," she says, enigmatically, "opens itself up to multiple interpretations."
Memory and its reliability is a strong theme in Lucky Us, several characters talk about memory in one way or another.
Is that from her years as a psychotherapist, a therapy that mines memory?
“Memory is unreliable,” she says, “a compilation of the event, the recollection of the event, the feelings around the event and everything that happened before and everything that happens after.”
It’s a theme she warms to in conversation, giving examples of faulty recollections but her interest in memory does not spring from her past profession.
“It’s impossible to think that if you are an adult, that you were a child or you have children that you haven’t noticed that memory is subject to a lot of other forces.”
Bloom's output as a writer has been varied and prolific. She has published novels, short stories, a children's book, a non-fiction psychology book and written a television drama series for US television, State of Mind. She now teaches creative writing at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
She teaches poetry in her prose class “just because they should pay attention for the image that lasts, for doing as much as you can with a page of words and not blah blah blah”.
Are you working on a new novel I ask, "Well not this minute," she says as we sit in the sunshine, later adding that yes there is a work in progress, The Ballyhoo, which like Lucky Us and her previous critically well-received novel, Away, is set in the 1930s and 1940s. "It's feels very accessible and knowable period to me."
Bloom did "tons" of research for Lucky Us. "The language is very important. I don't have to look it up. I know what they say. I know what the slang is. It's a different model of speech, less uniformity".
I mention how her use of the word “gobshite” in this American novel stopped me in my tracks. It is 1930s America and Edgar, born Jewish, is passing himself off as an English gentleman.
He’s in Ohio, a self-taught fantasist given to flowery pronouncements and showing off what he’s learned. But gobshite?
“But I think the person using it is English,” Bloom says, her voice steely.
“You have to remember the guy who is saying it is a loose amalgam of Britishisms that are intended entirely to be functional in the United States.”
I don't argue the point. Lucky Us by Amy Bloom, is published by Granta
