His debut novel, The Altruists, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Paris Review staff pick, an Amazon Editors’ Pick, and the People Book of the Week. It won the Friends of American Writers Award and was longlisted for the Prix du Meilleur livre étranger and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Prize.
He is the editor of Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Le Monde, Bookforum, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Boston Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Ridker lives in Brooklyn, New York.
My Q&A with the author:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Andrew Ridker's website.
Hope, as a title, serves two primary functions. For one, it situates the novel in historical context: the book is set during Barack Obama’s second term, at a time when the optimism that propelled him into office had begun to wane. Though most of the story unfolds in 2013, I approached it like a work of historical fiction. Trump, Covid, and #MeToo, among other catastrophes, hang over the novel like a ghostly epilogue.
With a title as brief and abstract as Hope, I knew it needed a powerful image accompanying it. The photograph that I found for the cover, Bat Mitzvah Dance, Chicago, IL by Melissa Ann Pinney, fills in the specifics that a single word can’t. Comedy, tragedy, family, ambition, Jewishness, the pains of growing up: the title and the cover in tandem suggest all of these.
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?
The book is set primarily in Brookline, Massachusetts, the sylvan streetcar suburb west of Boston where I grew up. As a kid, I didn’t think much of it, but as I got older, I started to see my hometown for what it was: a liberal utopia built—likeall utopias—on contradictions. My teenage self would be surprised to learn I wrote about Brookline, but I think he’d be pleased with the result.
Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?
Beginnings are torture for me. I must have written a hundred different drafts of my book’s first section, “The Hunger Banquet.” I feel an immense amount of pressure to get the tone right from the opening lines, since they’re coming out of nowhere. Endings, on the other hand, tend to grow organically from the story that precedes them.
Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?
I think my characters are all grounded in parts of myself. One of the joys of writing fiction, and especially fiction with multiple points of view, is the freedom to wear those different masks. But it’s still me under there.
What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
Hal Ashby, John Prine, Faith Ringgold, Mel Brooks, MF Doom, Isabelle Huppert, Thomas Hart Benton.
--Marshal Zeringue