First Work of Fiction. Soon after its publication, duBois received a Whiting Award and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award. Her second novel, Cartwheel, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and the winner of the Housatonic Book Award. And her third novel, The Spectators, was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Stanford University Stegner Fellowship, duBois teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University. She lives in Austin.
My Q&A with the author:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit the official Jennifer duBois website.
I tend to feel pretty helpless about titles: I never know where they’ll come from, when they’ll appear in the process (if ever), or how they’ll be received. The phrase “the last language” was in my head a lot while I was writing, and though I can’t say it’s a precise reference to any single concept in the book, it did seem to generate several meaningful interpretations: the idea that Angela’s epistolary account of her relationship with Sam might be the last piece of language between them, and that Sam’s conversations with Angela might be the last connection through language he ever experiences at all; the broader (more optimistic) thought that whatever communion that existed between Angela and Sam—be it partly spiritual, subconscious, or sub-verbal—reflects the deepest form of language, the kind that will outlive all the particular tongues we know. Throughout the book, Angela is scouring global languages, hoping that their insights might illuminate the fundamental question that haunts her: does language predate thought, or the other way around? Maybe The Last Language as a title contains the suggestion that if she just finds the final language—whatever that is—it will contain the definitive answer. And of course I thought a million times while writing it that this book would probably be my last novel; I think all my books have had titles that in some way describe not only the plot/thematic concern but also the literary project at hand, and so for a time, calling this book The Last Language seemed right in that regard.
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?
My teenage reader self was, lucky for me, on a journey of pretty radical re-assessment of my literary values, so it would really depend on the year we caught up with me. I think my eighteen-year-old self would have been thrilled I’d written a novel at all, even more thrilled that I’d written a novel that seemed to engage with Lolita. I think if my teenage self could read The Last Language, I might be invited to reconsider Lolita—not to condemn it, but to reconsider where I thought its complexity derived. But I think even my fifteen-year-old self, who was much more innocent and much less settled on any particular literary opinion, would have been pleased that I’d written a book in which uncomfortable moral entanglements aren’t miraculously resolved through external coincidence, so that the characters don’t actually have to grapple with the consequences of making a decision. (Jane Eyre. I am talking about Jane Eyre.)
Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?
For me, endings seem to sort of write themselves—by the time I get two-thirds of the way through a novel I have a pretty clear sense of the final third, and by the time I get to the very end I usually have a whole bunch of cherished images and sentences and downbeats I’ve been saving up to use. I find beginnings to be much harder. The beginning of The Last Language came pretty easily; those opening paragraphs were the first part of the book that I wrote, and they contained so much information about the novel I was writing—the voice, the direct address, the fact that the narrator is writing from jail—that I felt a lot ofnatural momentum going forward. But other times I’ve really struggled with the opening pages. For two of my books in particular, I went around and around with editing and polishing the beginnings, and something about them still feels a little off to me. Which is high-stakes, given that readers who aren’t taken with a beginning will probably just jump ship, understandably.
Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?
I wouldn’t be curious enough about a character to write about them if they weren’t significantly different from me. My characters all experience situations and dilemmas that I haven’t; in almost every case, they make decisions that I would not (not necessarily better decisions, but certainly more dramatically interesting ones). Some of my characters have sharply different moral priorities than I do, and others have profound intellectual, political, or religious attachments I don’t share. And usually my characters differ from me demographically in significant ways, as well—The Last Language is actually the first time I’ve written from the perspective of white woman living in the United States in the 21st century. All that said, because all of my characters’ brains come from my own, there are similarities between them that I can’t get rid of, even when I’ve tried. For one thing, they are all very verbal—even though lots of people experience the world in ways that are more physical or visual or intuitive than my characters, I don’t really know how to write a person like that, because my own consciousness is just wall-to-wall words. And most of my point of view characters are, in my opinion, pretty funny. For some, this is a significant aspect of characterization; for others, it’s more incidental—but the reason that my characters so consistently make jokes is that I like to make jokes in my writing, and if I make a joke I think is halfway decent, I will always be too vain to take it out. So this probably puts some kinds of characters out of range for me—I’ll probably never be able to write somebody extremely solemn or humorless or reverential before all things.
What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
An interest in geopolitics, which plays a large role in my first novel and a significant one in my second. News stories and gossip, since most of my fiction begins with at least a snippet of some real-life event I find compelling. Comedy, maybe especially sketch comedy, because I wish I was funny enough to be an SNL writer and this thwarted desire comes out everywhere, including in my writing. An interest in languages and linguistics. The woods around the house where I grew up in western Massachusetts. And my undergraduate degree in philosophy, certainly, since every book I write tends to grapple with some moral or philosophical question I find truly irreducible.
The Page 69 Test: A Partial History of Lost Causes.
My Book, The Movie: A Partial History of Lost Causes.
The Page 69 Test: Cartwheel.
--Marshal Zeringue