Readers Place

Andrew Rosenheim interview/review

1. Some of the details in Keeping Secrets seem like they might be autobiographical. An American who comes to live in England, for example? How much is this the case with Keeping Secrets? And in your opinion, is it true that every novel is to some extent autobiographical?

I have certainly drawn on some of my experiences in recounting my hero Jack Renoir’s new life in the UK, but with a twist: Jack comes to England with fresh eyes and for the first time — I have lived here for thirty years. Like most realistic or naturalist writers, I find elements of autobiography creep into my work, but writing fiction inevitably transforms the facts of the real world — even when the events or characters of a story seem lifted straight from life. Inevitably, however, readers are always keener to trace parallels between life and fiction than to see how much has been changed. The novel has a formal quality which heightens the excitement in the closing stages as the two narrative threads interweave and finally converge.

1. Is structure in writing as important as the prose itself? And do you think this is something that a writer learns, or is it partly natural and instinctive?

I don’t think anything is as important as the prose itself, since pace, events, character, setting — all the major aspects of a book — are only gripping to readers if the words themselves compel. But structure is a crucial backbone for any successful work of fiction. Novels are necessarily artificial — when undiluted reality is shoved onto the pages of a book it results in an artistic mess and, paradoxically, for a novel to seem credibly life-like it has to be well crafted. Life itself is too incoherent and random and sometimes even freakishly coincidental to make plausible fiction — just think how many times we say of some real event, ‘if you put that in a novel nobody would believe it.’ And nobody would. I think the ability to write narrative that makes readers want to turn the page is largely instinctive, but creating well-structured novels is something a writer learns — though generally only through the experience of doing it. You can certainly teach theories of narrative structure in a classroom, but not how to align the structure seamlessly to the emotional development of your story. If the characters do not ring true, if the writing is feeble, then even the most artful structuring of a book will not be interesting to read.

1. The novel makes rather a good case for not keeping secrets. Do you think it always better to be honest about things with people? Or are there some things best kept to oneself?

I’m tempted to say that’s for me to know and you to find out. Seriously, though, I think we need to distinguish between honesty and integrity. Too often, putative ‘honesty’ is simply a mask for unkindness — think of people who say, ‘ I tell it like it is; sorry, that’s just the way I am’, with a wearying kind of pride, oblivious to (or even sometimes happy about) the damage they inflict. Integrity, on the other hand, is both harder to define (it’s more than just the correlation of what is said to what are the facts) and I think far more valuable. Integrity is not aggressive, and almost by definition not self-conscious; yet I think when you meet people who have it, it’s instantly unrecognisable. It’s a rare quality, and difficult to articulate — like this answer…