Transcript: Culture Chat — Margaret Atwood, John Grisham and friends write a novel

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Culture Chat — Margaret Atwood, John Grisham and friends write a novel’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and this is our Friday chat show.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This week we are talking about a new collaborative novel called Fourteen Days. It’s one novel written by 36 authors including Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, Celeste Ng, Angie Cruz, and the Goosebumps author RL Stine. Fourteen Days tells the story of a group of residents in a New York City apartment building who are stuck there in the early days of the Covid lockdown. They start to gather on the roof every night and tell each other stories, and each story is written by a different author. It’s all narrated and held together by the building’s super, or the building manager who is secretly recording their conversations. It is quite a 352-page ride and an interesting experiment. So today we’re gonna talk about whether it worked. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and I’m secretly recording this conversation. Joining me from the FT headquarters in London from a fainting couch on the roof is the FT’s acting deputy books editor Andrew Dickson. Hi, Andy.

Andrew Dickson
Hey, we got a great view of some pools, so it’s all good.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s not bad. And with him on that roof in London is our assistant arts and books editor and author of the novel little scratch. It’s Rebecca Watson. Hi, Rebecca. Welcome back.

Rebecca Watson
Hello.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m so happy to have you both here. And to get into it, my first question is just what you both thought. Like, what is your top-line take? Andy?

Andrew Dickson
Well, my top-line take, honestly, I don’t wanna be too much of a downer to start this conversation, but I assigned this book for review and it came through because it looked, right, interesting and exciting. And there are some fascinating and big authors in this. I hadn’t read it before I sent out the copy to our reviewer and I’m starting to feel really sorry for our reviewer Mika Ross-Southall who wrote about it a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, I was not a huge fan.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Rebecca, what about you?

Rebecca Watson
Yeah, I didn’t expect to love it. And spoiler: I didn’t love it. I thought for a novel that’s yeah, told by what, 36 people, it was surprisingly flat to me. Like it almost felt surprisingly one voice despite the fact that you have this kind of amazing collection of people that were bringing their own, like, stance to it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. OK. I am gonna find myself defending this book. I’m not sure why. I had a real rollercoaster of emotions with this book. Initially, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the premise. I didn’t like being on a roof during Covid. I didn’t like the narrator. I didn’t like the structure. But then . . . 

Andrew Dickson
Apart from that . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Inaudible) No, but I found myself sort of slowly liking some of the stories and the spirit of some of the stories. And in the end, I felt like it had sort of redeemed itself, at least as a kind of interesting experiment with many flaws. But the one thing I liked the most, I think, is that it introduced me to some authors that I didn’t know about. And I found myself liking some of the authors I knew less about more than the big names.

Andrew Dickson
Yeah, there’s definitely a sense, isn’t there, with some of them. Some of these big-name authors do give every impression of having phoned it in or indeed replied to the pitch in the commission within two hours (laughs) in an email and written the story or you know, have reached into their bottom drawer to produce something. Maybe that’s unfair, but . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Shout out to John Grisham.

Andrew Dickson
Yeah. Well, I mean, John Grisham. We need to talk about John Grisham. But, yeah, I think that there is, it’s a democratic project, isn’t it, this idea of putting, as you say, kind of marquee names next to writers who many readers might not be so aware of or not really know their work and give them all the same brief and the same space. And of course, also we should say the book has the names on the cover and on the flyleaf but you don’t know, as you’re reading it, who’s written what. It’s not until you get to the final pages that you actually sort of find out. And actually, you have to kind of want to find out because it’s not super easy to locate the individual stories.

Rebecca Watson
Yeah, it’s really quite hard.

Andrew Dickson
Yeah. Which I suppose must be a choice.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s like a puzzle.

Andrew Dickson
Exactly. There is a puzzle element there, isn’t there? So I think you could read this and think, actually I’m just not gonna, I don’t care which story Margaret Atwood wrote or John Grisham wrote or whoever else. I will just enjoy this as a series of tales. But yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
But I wonder if it actually worked as a novel. I’m curious what you both think, but I felt like at some point in the book I decided, actually this is a collection of short stories. I’m gonna start thinking about it that way. And it made me like it more.

Rebecca Watson
It definitely is a collection of short stories with an agreed setting and agreed character list. I’m assuming that the way it worked was not that the manuscript was passed from person to person. And that was a sense of kind of building upon what’s come before. And I think that’s quite important because I think there’s really a limited sense of propulsion throughout the novel because each kind of splinter just has its own personal integrity. And there isn’t really a sense of like a relationship between each story even though we’re, since we have this rooftop and we have these like set of characters that remain the same.

Andrew Dickson
Yeah, there’s a strange thing there as well, isn’t there? For all that we get the same characters emerging on the rooftop, night after night, as they tell stories to each other, you don’t get a sense of them as characters. Or I didn’t, anyway.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So there’s a lot wrong with this book. But some things work and I would love to talk about some of the stories for us to give listeners a sense of what did and what didn’t work. Why don’t we start with you, Andy? What’s the story that you sort of either think helped the book or hurt the book?

Andrew Dickson
To me, the stories that felt most real are the ones that come most alive and feel most performed and respond to the frame, right, where someone is standing up in front a group of people, and it’s like a piece of theatre or something. And there’s a story in day 13, which is called “Storyteller”.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Written by Dave Eggers.

Andrew Dickson
Written by Dave Eggers. It’s set at a kind of open mic night and the character is telling a story which sort of begins as a joke. And she’s saying, you know, this kind of crazy thing happened to me. And what actually happened to her is that a friend of hers was assaulted, was raped by a guy. And she goes on this revenge spree to try and track him down and make him suffer. And I won’t spoil what happens. Also, it’s kind of gruesome. And the story is not in any way a joke and you can get a real sense of the audience in the story itself being horrified by what they’re listening to. That really leapt off the page to me because it felt performed and it felt like actually, this is a kind of story that someone might tell. And compared to some of the others, it felt that there was a real response to the premise of the book there.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. A story that I liked was the story by Mira Jacob, who’s a writer and a graphic novelist. And in it, briefly, the character’s mother died and she’s kind of a strange bird. And when the character and her dad are reflecting on her mother’s life, they learn this family secret. And you find out the secret had appeared to her in past dreams. And it was kind of a nub of a story. It wasn’t too deep and it didn’t go too far but it felt kind of small in scope in a way that I liked. So I found myself actually, even though in big picture, I felt like there was a lot lacking, I did, small picture, find myself underlining quite a few lines in the different stories.

Rebecca Watson
Yeah, and I think that those are really good examples of like real, real stories. The kind of stories that you would tell. Like when you’re anecdotally talking about so, you know, if someone’s like, come on, come on, tell me a story. Or like you have this, it’s like with the situational rooftop where you know that eventually you’re gonna have to be the one to talk about things in your life. I think the stories that, like, do, you know, stick with you are often ones where it doesn’t entirely make sense why they feel like stories to you, why they have kind of remained with you for that many years. And they do have that kind of very specific feel, slightly kind of spooky or strange or off-kilter.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, totally.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

How did you both feel about the Covid premise? I didn’t love being brought back to Covid, but I know there’s a lot of literature and culture that’s coming out about it, even still. Andy, what did you think?

Andrew Dickson
Yeah, I agree. I didn’t really want to be back there. I don’t know who does. I entirely understand why novels deal with it and novelists want to write about it. There’s this nice line that Ian McEwan said once. I think that it’s a bit like a tree falling over in your, on the path in front of you. You’re gonna have to cross it at some point. It’s got to have to be dealt with. But as a reader anyway, I just didn’t really want to be back there. It’s both sort of too soon. And also, it’s too distant. And there’s something about the premise of this that makes me think, oh, I just, I wanna look away. Which is interesting in itself. There might be an interesting novel to be written about why people don’t wanna go back to Covid. It might be that we’re not able to do it yet. It might be that no one is able to write that book yet.

Rebecca Watson
Yeah. I just think it’s far too early to be writing anything that directly deals with the pandemic. It’s too close. And I think we’re kind of incapable of seeing it because the perspective, right, it’s like you’re turning around and the person’s still just standing right there, like they need to be further back. I mean, when I finished my second novel which I was, you know, half of which was written during the pandemic, one moment during the writing of that being like, oh right, great, now I’ve got to set the timeline so it definitely finishes far before the pandemic begins. Otherwise, it’s this whole kind of obstacle that you have to kind of have to handle, have to look at.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, so next I would love to talk about this as an experiment. We picked this because we were excited about the idea of experimentation in literature. And it’s cool that it’s trying to do something new with the form and interesting that it’s trying to do something new with the writing process. And it’s clear that we agree that it didn’t necessarily work. But I guess what was the thing we were hoping for? You know, if not this, then what? Like at this time, what is the thing that we would want to see out of an experiment like this or even a collaboration like this?

Rebecca Watson
Yeah. I think for me, I would want to be surprised more about the change in voice. I think if you’re having a collaborative novel and the idea is those kind of contrasts and diversions, then I think I’d want to feel that more. I think maybe they should have liberated them a bit more, allowed them to get a bit more markup and see what happened.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. What about you, Andy?

Andrew Dickson
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I was thinking, actually, that in a strange way, my issue with this book almost is that at some level the concept is quite experimental. This idea of this democracy of voices and authors of different reputations and backgrounds and everything else and that they’re being brought into the same space. And you don’t know who is who, and you’re playing a kind of puzzle game trying to figure it out. But actually, when you think of, I don’t know, a writer like Sheila Heti and the experiments that she is doing, or kind of autofiction writers or someone like Jon Fosse, the Norwegian guy who just won the Nobel Prize. It’s like, actually there are more interesting things happening with a kind of singular intelligence in novels, I think, than this was capable of doing. And I think maybe that’s the problem is that at some level, maybe like many group projects, it doesn’t quite come together.

Rebecca Watson
Yeah. And by the way, it’s like a dream commission. Like obviously anyone would say yes to it. It’s a fun idea, like you don’t know how it’s gonna go. Like you’re like, sure, I’m not committing to loads, like it’s grey. But I think that’s kind of omits its structure in itself. Right? Like it’s a publishing experiment rather than an experimental novel. I think to call it an experimental novel, which, you know, they do. And I think that is how it’s kind of talked about online and stuff. But I think that’s pretty disingenuous.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, that’s an interesting distinction. Rebecca and Andy, this was really fascinating. Thank you both. We will be back in just a moment for More or Less.

[UNHEDGED PODCAST TRAILER PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome back for More or Less, the part of the show where each guest says something that they want more of or less of in culture. Andy, what do you have?

Andrew Dickson
Oh, please could I do a less?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Do a less, please do a less.

Andrew Dickson
I suppose technically it should be a fewer, but please, can we have fewer biopics? I never want to see another biopic ever again. I have literally, it feels like all I’ve been watching at the cinema. Priscilla, Maestro, Oppenheimer, obviously sort of re-emerged in cinemas. We’ve got the Bob Marley coming up. I was just reading today, apparently, Goebbels — Joseph Goebbels biopic is just sold at the Berlin Film Festival. I mean, it’s just, I don’t know, particularly also famous guys. This is like my issue with Maestro, that notionally it was kind of about Leonard Bernstein sort of told through the experience of his family and his wife most of all, but actually it was still a picture about a guy. So I just, yeah, I just kill off all biopics. That’s me.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I can use a break from these too. I agree. Rebecca, what about you?

Rebecca Watson
OK. I’m gonna go for a more. I saw All of Us Strangers at the weekend, which is — and I also saw Aftersun last year — and the two films, I mean, what’s the common denominator here? There’s sort of an interplay of memory and childhood — both autobiographical. And they’re very beautiful, very artistic films. And they also both have Paul Mescal in them.

Andrew Dickson
So it’s just basically more films with Paul Mescal.

Lilah Raptopoulos
A very popular more.

Rebecca Watson
So I just think that . . . Yeah, given how good both those films are, like, the logic would be: more Paul Mescal.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mine is a more to . . . the day that we are recording, it’s snowing in New York. And my niece has virtual school. She was not given a snow day and I feel really sad about that for her. I feel like snow day should still exist. We should have more of them. And they should be days in which we just lie in bed and read poems and read books that we were meant to read and watch stupid television. And that’s our God-given right. So more snow days.

Andrew Dickson
Completely agree. And they should also apply to adults particularly.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I agree.

Rebecca Watson
Yeah. If anything, that’s more important.

Andrew Dickson
Even more important.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Andy, Rebecca, this is really so much fun. Thank you both for coming on the show.

Andrew Dickson
Cheers.

Rebecca Watson
Thanks for having us.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. Take a read through the show notes. We have linked to everything mentioned today, including the FT’s review of Fourteen Days. Every link that goes to the FT will get you past the paywall. Rebecca also has a novel out this year, it’s called I Will Crash. So keep an eye out for that. Also in the show notes is a subscription to the Financial Times and ways to stay in touch with me and with the show on email and on Instagram. I’m very responsive and love hearing from you. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful week and we’ll find each other again on Monday.

[MUSIC PLAYING]