I just finished reading this terrific new novel by Mitchell James Kaplan.
We talk by phone today.
Luke: “Mitchell, when you were a child, did you want to be a novelist when you grew up?”
Mitchell: “Yes. Certainly from the age of 15 at the latest. Books were my refuge.”
Luke: “Refuge from what?”
Mitchell: “I grew up in the late ’60s, early ’70s. They were my refuge from a dysfunctional world. I think of fiction as a way of approximating truth, a way to try to find something beyond the dysfunction of the world that makes sense.”
Luke: “I heard someone say that art [well, pornography] is a solace from the frustrations of real life.”
“Where did you grow up?”
Mitchell: “My father lived in Beverly Hills. He was a cardiologist at UCLA. My mother lived in Munich, Germany. I went to high school at a boarding school near Santa Barbara called the Cate school. Then I went away to college at Yale. Then I lived in Paris for seven years.”
“Southern California never felt like home to me.”
