Suzanne Berne

Suzanne Berne is the author of the novels The Dogs of Littlefield, The Ghost at the Table, A Perfect Arrangement, and A Crime in the Neighborhood, winner of Great Britain’s Orange Prize.

Her latest novel is The Blue Window.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

There isn’t much explicit information in the title The Blue Window, but I think it offers a sense of mystery. A window looks out at something and also allows you to look within. So, what is being looked at, and who’s doing the looking? Are we inside or outside?

The title comes from a Matisse painting I’ve always loved. In the painting there are objects on a table by a window; outside the window is a luminous blue evening. But the window itself hardly exists.

Usually all the “stuff” of your inner life divides you from the outer world, but every so often that separation fades, and you have the feeling of joining the rest of the universe. Matisse’s painting captures that rare experience. At the end of my novel, one of my characters also gets a glimpse of it.

What’s in a name?

I thought a lot about the names of all three main characters. Marika is an elderly Dutch woman and needed a Dutch name. I also wanted a hard-sounding name, with an “eek” in it. There’s a fair amount of hidden shrieking going on in that apparently impervious character.

Lorna, her daughter, sounds like “forlorn,” which is true of that character, though she tries very hard to be the positive one in the novel.

Adam, the grandson, is of course named after the first man, which I liked because Adam is extremely immature and becoming a “man” is something he struggles with in ways that are both comic and serious.

They’re all common-enough names, but a little weird, too, when you look at them closely. And together they form a distinctive family.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I’d probably be surprised by the role the setting plays here. The story takes place in a remote part of northern Vermont, on Lake Champlain, which helps dramatize the characters’ various kinds of isolation. But it’s the beauty of that place I wouldn’t have expected myself to focus on, how often it contrasts with the characters’ actions and attitudes, and yet how it works on them as well.

As a teenager, I wasn’t paying much attention to where things happened. It was all about who was there.

Do you find it harder to write beginning or endings? Which do you change more?

I change the beginnings the most—sometimes I’m still rewriting the beginning of a novel in the final drafts. But the ending is the most delicate part of the whole operation. An ending needs to conclude the story in a way that feels satisfying, yet not too final.

Or to put it another way: the story may have ended for your readers, but you hope they feel it hasn’t stopped for the characters, who now have to go on with the rest of the lives, even though we aren’t watching them anymore.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Embarrassing as it is to admit, my main characters are always drawn from parts of myself. Usually, the parts that I can’t quite accommodate. Which is not to say that my characters are autobiographical—I did not live through World War II in Amsterdam, I am not a divorced therapist, or a nineteen-year-old boy who is afraid to go back to college because he did something humiliating during finals week. But my characters' struggles are always with things that I find confounding and difficult.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I wanted to be a naturalist when I was growing up, and a cartoonist. Both of those failed ambitions are very much a part of my writing.

Visit Suzanne Berne's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Blue Window.

--Marshal Zeringue