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BLP: Your stories often reference the symbiosis between (dis)location and identity. As someone who was born in the former Soviet Union, and who has lived all over the United States—California, Virginia, Connecticut, and, of course, Nebraska—how has your own sense of self been affected by the differing political and geographic atmospheres?
YPR: My mother is Russian and my father American. I grew up in Southern California speaking Russian at home and English at school. My American classmates considered me Russian. When I traveled with my mother to the Soviet Union, the Russians considered me American. I was always neither, and both. All my life I have had the sense of being an outsider, not wholly of this culture or of the other. Also, I started out majoring in journalism in college and spent a few years working at daily newspapers. That objective reporter’s point of view contributed to my sense of being an outsider looking in. As an adult, I’ve moved all over the country. I believe this feeling of alienation, of standing apart, is one that many people—not just those who come from dual cultures or move frequently—experience to lesser and greater degrees. And certainly some of my characters struggle with this, desiring to discover their identities through their geographic coordinates, desiring the landscape—the places they are from or in which they find themselves—to reflect who they are, to give them a sense of belonging, a sense of being—or coming—home.
BLP: Of Nebraska, you have your protagonist write “For me, this bland Midwestern Americana is the exotic.” How did the contrast between California and Nebraska inform this character?
YPR: This character—who narrates the opening and closing stories in the book—is a Southern Californian, born and bred. He’s known little else, and when he decides to make a dramatic change in his environment, he seeks out a place that seems to him remote and exotic: Nebraska. Clearly some of my own attitudes and experiences informed this character. As a child growing up in Southern California, I was always intrigued with that vast, amorphous place in the middle of the country. “Flyover” country was so alluring to me that I applied to graduate school there. And from the beginning Nebraska captivated me. I think it is a fascinating place precisely because it’s a part of the country that is often overlooked. I decided to create a character who was an outsider and explore that perspective. And so he’s amazed by tornado sirens, snow days, a corn maze, Huskers football games—aspects of Nebraska life that probably seem boring and commonplace to natives. Whereas for him, the boring and the commonplace would include palm trees, sunny weather year round, cactus gardens, smog alerts, picking ripe oranges off of trees in January, earthquakes, sitting in traffic on twelve-lane freeways, the beach, the mountains, the desert, Hollywood, Disneyland. To a Nebraskan, those might seem amazing and exotic, but not to my narrator (or to me). It’s all a matter of perspective, of where you’re coming from, where you are situated, geographically but also psychologically.
BLP: In the story Curator, you’ve created a character whose identity is contained entirely within her home, itself a moment frozen in time. In this sense, the catalogue is the contents of a living museum; objects impart her identity; they create the subject. In the title story, the opposite is true: the main character makes lists of objects around her in an attempt to bring order to chaos, to find a foothold for self-awareness. What connections do you find between objects and identity?
YPR: In contemporary America, we are awash in objects; indeed, at times it seems we are drowning in stuff. Many of us suffer from the “tyranny of things”—a phrase that was coined in 1906 to describe America’s “passion for accumulation,” a national pathology that is more than a century old. I find this a fascinating topic of inquiry, both for fiction and nonfiction. Isn’t identity in America, now and historically, intertwined with accumulation? Aren’t we, in a sense, inseparable from our possessions, our stuff, as well as our appetites for more things? Of course, there are exceptions—people, for example, who own fewer than one hundred things or live in a space the size of a walk-in closet—but these are notable precisely because they seem to have somehow beat the hoarding bug. Objects certainly lie at the heart of the two stories that you mention, and though the two characters are different and are preoccupied with objects for disparate reasons, I find their similarities to be striking as well. Don’t we hold onto objects—material possessions—sometimes in lieu of, or at least as a supplement to, human relationships? I see both of these characters as foregrounding their relationships with physical objects in order to avoid dealing with human relationships.
BLP: Love plays a role in many of the stories in this collection: unrequited love, exploratory love, desperate love, familial love. But you refrain from cataloguing love—why? What power does that lend the theme?
YPR: On the one hand, love is slippery and elusive and hopelessly difficult to catalogue, but on the other hand, you might say the book as a whole—the stories that make up the collection—form a catalogue of types of love. It’s up to the reader, then, to come up with that final catalogue form. What are the loves that the collection catalogues? Maybe that’s the question I am leaving readers with when they come to the end. There’s romantic love and familial love, but also, as one reader pointed out to me, the characters in this book lose children in a myriad of ways—through divorce, abortion, crib death, adoption. So the book is a catalogue of losses, too, because love and loss go hand in hand. This is a particularly relevant question because since writing this book, these characters’ stories have been continuing themselves. The characters are going on and living their lives, and new stories are forming, and one of them is shaping up to be something like a catalogue of love, which, by its very nature, is also a catalogue of loss.
BLP: Uncertainty is another abstraction that you draw from your characters. Philosophically, people crave the definite, and yet uncertainty is perhaps the only concept that is, in fact, certain. Modern science insists that ambiguity is not only inevitable, but our primary conduit to wonder. A catalogue, though, is an attempt to define. How did this dichotomy inform your writing?
YPR: I think to some extent this dichotomy informs all fiction. In writing fiction, we are attempting to define, to pinpoint, to fix in words on the page, that which is uncertain, changing, unknowable, or unutterable. The form in which I chose to make this attempt at defining is the catalogue, which has a long tradition in literature, from the epic catalogues in Homer and Virgil to Walt Whitman’s catalogues of Americana in Leaves of Grass. Historically, these catalogues attempted to set down in detail the environment, to give a rendering of setting, to give an accounting of a nation’s wealth. They suggest a wide scope, show significance, and fix items in place, tidily itemizing (in the case of Homer) the ships before they annihilate one another in war. Or in Whitman’s case, he is painting America in its breadth, showing its expanse through detail. The catalogues in the title story of my collection, however, achieve a different effect. Instead of wealth and grandeur, the catalogues reveal poverty and limitations. They reveal the narrator’s working-class preoccupations. Rather than a reckoning of greatness and breadth, they are a recording of the minutiae of contemporary life, the minutiae that she must sift through and sort on a daily basis—that we all do, really, the difference being that she chooses to focus her attention on the minutiae, on the objects, on the junk. The narrator’s world is messy, fragmented, ever shifting; her existence is not fixed. Life keeps happening to her all around her even as she tries to make the catalogues. In some ways, in all these stories, it is precisely the characters’ realizations that ambiguity and disarray reign that lead them to try to exert organizational control over the entropy—by making a catalogue, by turning a house into a museum of a crime, or by caching bits of grief within the rigid fixed forms of video games and bus schedules. |
