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Miniatures
Interview
with author Norah Labiner
Publishers
Weekly
The Belle of Minneapolis
by Brad Zellar -- 10/28/2002
Coffee
House Press publisher Allan Kornblum recalls the first
time he met Norah Labiner, whose second novel, Miniatures,
has recently been released by the Minneapolis independent
to wide acclaim and good sales. "I remember I told
someone, 'I've just met Emily Dickinson,' " Kornblum
tells PW.
For
a 35-year-old author of two novels-Coffee House also
published her first novel, Our Sometime Sister
in 1998-Labiner has already acquired a reputation bordering
on mystique. Her two novels are richly allusive excursions
into modernist territory, marked by her prodigious reading
and an astonishing absorption of pop culture. They also
deviate sharply from much of the experimental fiction
they will inevitably be compared to in their deft juggling
of tangled plot lines and Labiner's exuberant and immediately
recognizable first-person voice.
On
a recent afternoon, Labiner sat down with a visitor
in the living room of the home she shares with her longtime
companion, a Minneapolis rock musician. She grew up
in Michigan and attended the University of Michigan
before moving to Minnesota to attend graduate school.
Labiner worked for a time as an indexer at a local library,
and at various coffee shops around town. She mailed
off the finished manuscript of her first novel to Coffee
House, unsolicited, and was surprised when they agreed
to publish it. "I didn't have the slightest idea
how publishing worked," she now admits.
Labiner
is often described as shy and reclusive, and she has
generally avoided the self-promotion expected of authors
in the age of Oprah. She professes a dislike for book
tours and public readings. Even in the unusually close-knit
Twin Cities literary community, Labiner is regarded
as something of an enigma.
Labiner
shrugs at the fuss surrounding her books and her reputation. "I'm stubborn and I'm not a collaborator,"
she tells PW. "I definitely don't feel like I'm
a part of any literary scene.... A lot of the first
book came out of graduate school, so there was much
more of a process of collaborative effort that you get
with the whole workshop thing. I didn't realize how
much I hated that until I started Miniatures and didn't have to deal with other people's opinions."
Labiner
pounded out the final draft of Our Sometime Sister
alone in a cabin over a cold February in Michigan's
Upper Peninsula-the homestretch in an eight-year process
of completing the book-and that is somehow appropriate
for a writer whose novels feature such a compelling
sense of isolation and disconnection. The narrators
of both Our Sometime Sister and Miniatures
are interlopers, introspective and carefully observant
young women who bear more than a passing resemblance
to their creator. Our Sometime Sister is a novel-within-a-novel
that weaves plot elements and characters from Hamlet
into its story of protagonist Pearl Christomo's struggle
to make sense of her family. Miniatures, which
takes place in a gothic undertow swirling with the ghosts
of Mary Shelley and the Brontës, is ostensibly
the tale of Fern Jacobi-"painfully shy, nervous,
lost and full of an aimless and unrequited self loathing"-who
takes a job as a housekeeper for a couple of American
writers at a country house in Ireland. The couple, the
"crypto Byronic" Owen Lieb and his wife, Brigid,
have returned after a long absence to the home where
Lieb's first wife died. There are artfully exploited
parallels with the real-life travails of Sylvia Plath
and Ted Hughes, which Labiner uses as a launching point
for ruminations on the slippery nature of everything
from history and biography to issues of gender, power
and religion. Both of Labiner's novels hinge on the
central question, explicitly addressed in Miniatures, "How can anyone ever trust a storyteller?"
Labiner's
novels have been praised by reviewers, even as some
have quibbled with her digressive style. "People
want conventional storytelling," complains Labiner.
"They want a beginning, a middle and an end. They
want something to happen. When people complain about
the digressions in the books, they're essentially saying,
'cut to the chase.' But I'm just not interested in linear
storytelling. It's unnatural. I think it's much more
natural to have that kind of associative story line
going on that isn't all focused on simply getting you
to the end of the book. When I'm reading a book I really
like, I don't want it to end; I want more digressions."
After
having worked for years on a typewriter, Labiner now
uses a computer. "I still try to use it like a
typewriter," she admits. "I'll write a draft
of a chapter on the computer, print it out and then
delete the file from the hard drive, so that I have
to retype it all again and revise as I go along. That
way you really have to face all the bad sentences, and
you can't just leave things there because they're already
on the page."
Labiner
is already at work on her next book, her first attempt
at a third-person narrative. "It's oddly liberating,"
she says. "Just from a technical standpoint, it's
very difficult‹do you know how hard it is to get
someone to walk across a room? But there are a lot of
different possibilities with omniscience, and that definitely
more than makes up for the challenges."
While
Coffee House's Kornblum is thrilled to be publishing
Labiner's novels, and excited about her future, he's
also less-than-secretly hopeful that his press may be
only a stopping-off point on her way to even bigger
exposure and acclaim.
"If
we publish Norah's third book," Kornblum says without
hesitation, "it will be an indictment of New York
publishing."
Also available by this author:
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