Interview on the occasion of the publication of PERSONA NON GRATA

* Hello again. So what’s this one about, exactly? (Or even more or less?)

Funny you should ask. In fact, I call it my “Seinfeld novel” – it’s comic (at least it means to be) but it’s not really about anything (anything much, at any rate). I mean, things happen in it, of course, but not in the usual, caper-novelistic way. (Is that even a word, by the way? Well, it’s something, anyway.) The story has no explosions, violent crimes, kidnappings, revolutions, firefights – in fact, I’m pretty sure there isn’t a single shot fired or a punch even thrown in the entire book. No, what it is, rather, is pretty much the witnessing of the Second Law Of Thermodynamics – you know, the “Things fall apart” one – at work, in “real time”. Somewhat speeded-up, of course, to maintain interest – and involving amusing foreign people doing unusual things in exotic (or at least odd) settings. And voila.

* So – no message then? No “theme”?

Naaa. Well, maybe a few little mini-messages, snuck in here and there, but overall, no – you should think of the whole PERSONA NON GRATA package as just a between-covers amusement-park ride: fun, and even a bit exhilarating. But not much what used to be called “redeeming social value”. And “theme”? Themes not.

* Très drole.

N’est ce pas?

* It is all very French, isn’t it. Whereas you, of course, are not.

No, certainly not – red white and blue solid ’Merican, that’s me.

But you’re right, it is a bit Froggy, as you say. You see, the thing is – I’ve always been a Francophile, in addition to being an Anglophile, and what with one thing and another, I’ve ended up spending at least as much of my life in France or in French-speaking countries, as I have in the US or in English-speaking countries. In fact, I lived in Paris from age two to eleven, and I still return there to this day. Not to mention long stints of Francophone Africa in-between. And as my first two novels were in the voice of a very English young Englishman, and my next two were definitely America-centric – I thought it only fair that I should finally get around to doing a Froggie one.

Plus, as I say, I must confess that I’ve always liked France and the French. Indeed, I even managed, from time to time, when I was younger, to actually pass myself off as a Frogue – to other Frogues – which is no mean feat, believe me. Strewth. I can’t really do it anymore, mind you, as it’s an extremely tricky act of international prestidigitation to pull off – but, yes, I could swing it in my 25-45 year-old salad days (and certainly did so, to my occasional professional and social profit.)

* And Russia. In addition to being about France, PERSONA NON GRATA is about Russia, isn’t it. Well, “Russia-adjacent”, anyway.

Ah, now that’s a different story – but you’re right, it certainly is that. (Well spotted,) But yes, as you suggest, not Russia qua Russia (too big a target for such a relatively modest fictional undertaking), but a Russia-like country. In fact, I originally located PERSONA NON GRATA in Bulgaria, but as things progressed and I got to know Bulgaria a little better, my desire to ridicule it diminished – the new, non-Communist Bulgaria had done me no harm, much less have individual Bulgarians – so I invented the Republic of Gryaznia (which means, more or less, “muddy” in Russian. Oh, and the lovely name for its capital, Laina, means shit in Bulgarian. For realz, as the kidz say.)

* So you do have something against Russians? (If not Bulgarians?)

No, not really, other than finding them faintly, intrinsically comical.

But then again I find Germans, Italians, Africans, Arabs, the English, Froggies comical – hell, I find pretty much everybody intrinsically comical.

But no – just as some people are what they call “red diaper babies”, I’m what you could call a “cold war diaper baby”. I was introduced to the politics of Marxist-Leninist Eastern Europe at an unusually young age:

In the 50s, when my dad was based in Paris, my parents were active in a then-anti-communist outfit called The International Rescue Committee, and during the 1956 Hungarian uprising, when I was 10, I at one point found myself sharing my Ave. Foch bedroom with a grubby, smelly – and wiry and energetic – 12-year old Hungarian orphan boy who, just days previously, had literally been battling Soviet T-34 tanks in the Budapest streets. He and I quickly overcame our linguistic barriers and I became his enthusiastic acolyte. Among other things, he taught me how to make Molotov cocktails and, using my plastic models, showed me how to maneuver to take out tanks with them.

He moved on after a couple of weeks – to eventually become a US citizen and ending up a senior, decorated detective in the Washington D.C. police department.

And Ishtvan’s (for such was his name) passage chez nous instigated this memorable exchange I had with my dad one morning, over breakfast, as the old pater prepared to go to the office and I to the 6th grade at the American Community School, (which was then located in the communist-infested Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt):

ME: “Dad, what’s a ‘communist’?”

PATER: “Well, my boy, you know what a Nazi is, right?”

ME: “Acorse, sure.” (And I did, both from war movies that I’d seen, including Audie Murphy’s “To Hell And Back” which I’d seen about fifty times – and from the fact that my dad had been a 1LT in the OSS and had gone through Omaha Beach to the Liberation of Paris – a mere 12 years previously.)

PATER: “Well then – communists are exactly the same as Nazis – only in more rubbish uniforms.” (He’d been born and raised in England, and his speech always reflected it.)

* Wow. So yeah, you clearly came upon all this stuff at an early age.

Heh, you can say that again. In fact, in PERSONA NON GRATA, there are several passages involving the agonies that our hero, Michel-Ange, goes through with his English and Russian language lessons via the “Assimil” method – well, I also went through all those, as a kid. Not English, of course, but definitely Russian: my mom, a vigorous “pusher” of my brothers and me, insisted, among much else, that we learn Russian. And while I never learned it properly, mom turned out to be more right than wrong, and nearly half a century later, when I finally reached Russia (a mere two months after the fall of communism there, in Feb. 1992), the remnants of those painful lessons stood me in pretty useful stead.

* So from all this can we assume that there’s a lot of you in the main character, young Monsieur Michel-Ange de Whatsit?

Ha, no, that’s where you’d be wrong. No, Michel-Ange is an original.

But if there’s anyone that would recognize and sympathize with him, that would certainly have been my late brother Alsie – to whom I dedicate the book – who tragically and prematurely died of brain cancer on the last day of 1999.

Alsie (Alan) was a brilliant guy, a double-major (including “Soviet Studies”) at Brown, a Wall Street lawyer (Georgetown Law) whose clients ranged from Mobil Oil to the writer J. P. Donleavy, a journalist (he covered the fall of the Berlin Wall for VOGUE, of all people), a quite successful novelist (certainly more so than me) – and even the co-writer of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Muhammad Yunus’ “Banker To The Poor”.

But more to the point, while always, like me, a patriotic American to the core (he was the head of YAF at Brown), Alsie was above all, (and certainly before he acquired a splendid family), the universal, quintessential boulevardier, the supreme lad-about-town, always charming, constantly joking – he was, like David Niven, the guy who winked at the plain girl – he’d have known exactly why I dedicated this thing to him... and it was not only because he attended the same high school, (the Lycée Janson de Sailly), as Michel-Ange and also lived for a while on the Rue Mouffetard in Paris.

* Alright – so the hero this time isn’t you. That makes quite a change for P. N. Gwynne, no?

Whatever d’you mean?

* Well, weren’t David Phipps from FIRMLY BY THE TAIL and PUSHKIN SHOVE, Victor Paisley from THE BRONX BOMBING and Jerry Henderson from IMPERIALIST WARMONGER PIG all really just extensions of yourself?

No – and I resemble that remark, as my ΑΔΦ fraternity brothers used to say. Look, unless the protagonist of a novel is an out-and-out psychotic son-of-a-bitch, it’s fairly common practice for his or her creator to imbue that character with aspects of themselves – we are enjoined, after all, to “write what we know”, are we not? I mean, as Philip Roth said, “We are all writing fictitious versions of our lives all the time.”

* Philip Roth?

Yup. Not my favorite writer, by a long shot, but yeah, he said that – that quote is in THE COMPENDIUM, by the way – my upcoming quotations blog/project. But regardless, no, I was never entirely those guys in my novels, and in the current case of Michel-Ange de la Fassederad, he is sui generis – but if he has any actual person in him, it would be much more my late brother Alsie... than any Pee Enn.

* OK. But you’re still not getting off so easy: what’s with the punctuation? It’s eccentric, to put it mildly – if not actually off-putting.

Ah, get off my case. You too?

* No seriously.

Look, I’m sorry, but I try to transcribe how people talk – and the dialogue of my characters is how people talk. (At least the people I hear.) I mean – if you pay attention to how people actually speak, you’ll notice that they usually don’t do so in complete sentences (let alone paragraphs) – but, rather, they really do speak essentially in dashes and ellipses... especially when they’re speaking quickly or animatedly.

* If you say so, boss. But that, along with all the phonetic French and Russian, makes this book, or at least parts of it, a bit slow-going.

You think so, do you? Well, even if true, that wouldn’t be the end of the world, now would it. It’s no bad thing to push people a bit, surely. And anyway, look at Anthony Burgess – he wrote a complete best-seller, “A Clockwork Orange”, entirely in a made-up lingo of half-Russian and half-synthetic gibberish. Did people bust his ass for that?

* Yes, they almost certainly did. Plus, “A Clockwork Orange” was no best-seller until Stanley Kubrick stumbled onto it; plus you’re no Anthony Burgess.

No – I’m better.

* Oooo-kay, moving right along, here…

By the way, I like to think I don’t mis-use punctuation – I just use it imaginatively. A writer uses words creatively, so why shouldn’t he use punctuation that way as well?

* Hey, it’s your book. So what’s next for P. N. Gwynne?

Well, I’m toying with a novel about a libertarian sort of guy – a chartered-fishing boat captain out of Honolulu, a veteran – who, in a storm, crashes literally into a brand new, just-emerged volcanic island which he goes on to turn into his own private country. The book’s tentatively called BIG RANDOM DONUT but in any case it still, as Bill Buckley used to say, germinates within.

Much more proximate is the emergence, finally, and as I mentioned above, of an online compendium of idiosyncratic quotations that I’ve been collecting for decades – called, originally enough, THE COMPENDIUM. It will, as my older brother Paul, the ex-Green Beret, likes to say, “definitely separate the men from the sheep.” Watch this space; (a link to THE COMPENDIUM will appear on this site.)

* Good talk. Thanks.

No, thank you. Or, as my man Groucho Marx liked to sign off, “Hoping this finds you, I beg to remain. Regardless,”