Episode 031: Stewart O'Nan

Note: due to a scheduling problem, this interview and two others are text-only. Audio podcasts will return in the fall. Stewart O'Nan is the author of more than a dozen books, including the novels Snow Angels, A Prayer For The Dying, Last Night At The Lobster, and Songs For The Missing. He is a 1992 graduate of the Cornell MFA, and presently lives in Connecticut. He read at Cornell's Goldwin Smith Hall on April 19, 2009, and answered J. Robert Lennon's questions via email the previous week. You've entered a period of great popularity and critical success after years of slaving away in the midlist. I wonder if it's taken so long because your books are so different from one another--sometimes you almost seem like a new writer every time. Is this a conscious effort on your part? And do you think there is, beneath the diverse range of styles and approaches you've tried, a consistent underlying aesthetic? I just try to find the best approach to whatever I happen to be writing about. In the fiction, I'm in service to the characters, bringing their emotional world across to the reader, so it only makes sense that I use different forms and voices and points of view. That may confuse editors and marketing people more than it confuses readers. Across the books, I think there's a focus on the American soul--innocence and optimism colliding with atrocity and failure, the lone/strange individual vs. the ruling social group. I'm sure it stems from growing up in the late '60s/early '70s in Pittsburgh.