Maggie Shipstead's debut novel, "Seating Arrangements,"
is a cleverly-written, biting satire of New England "old money"
style families, detailing all the issues that come up over the course
of a wedding weekend. At its center is Winn Van Meter, an aging
socialite plagued by everything from the pregnancies of both his
daughters (not at the same time, thankfully, although Daphne is
pregnant for her wedding) to his three-year-long quest to join the
elusive Pequod club. Add to the mix the bevy of relationships he
has to juggle throughout the weekend, old and new alike, and the
affair Winn is considering, and you certainly have trouble brewing
for the whole Van Meter family!
Shipstead deftly handles the various loves, hates, hookups, breakups,
and affairs of her characters throughout the novel, and although she
is handling quite the ensemble, the author manages to keep things
clear and comprehensible for her audience as far as the characters'
interactions and desires go. Having said that, though, "Seating Arrangements"
is far from predictable, and some of its more dramatic moments
had me gripped in page-turning suspense.
GIVEAWAY: Don't take my word for it. This is your chance to win a copy. Email ELGeorgia@aol.com with Seating Arrangements in the subject line.
Contest ends August 25th at 11:59pm. Winner will be notified and have 24 hours to respond before a new winner is chosen. Good Luck! USA only.
A conversation with
Maggie Shipstead
author of
SEATING ARRANGEMENTS
Q: SEATING
ARRANGEMENTS is set on a Nantucket-like island off the coast of Cape Cod over a
three-day wedding weekend. What about this elite social setting drew you
in?
I grew up in Southern California. My parents are transplanted
Midwesterners who don’t like gin or lobster (I know: weird). I didn’t know what
a WASP was until I went to college, and then, through friends, distinctly
non-friends, and a boyfriend, I got something of a crash course, which was,
like most crash courses, intense but patchy and incomplete. I’m not a believer
in the old “write what you know” chestnut. I like to write about what I want to
know more about.
My first year of grad school, I was kicking around the question of what
problems come with privilege and entitlement. For example: if you think all
possibilities are rightfully open to you, whether in choosing a job or a mate,
then how do you ever decide? How can you ever be content? I hadn’t come up with
a way to approach these questions through fiction until a friend of mine had
the good grace to be hit by a golf cart while riding his bike on
Nantucket. (Naturally, he was wearing tennis whites.) His leg was cut badly
enough to need stitches, but the driver of the golf cart wouldn’t apologize.
This profoundly unsettled my friend. “You’re supposed to apologize,” he told me
on the phone. “Even if something’s not your fault, you apologize so everyone
feels better. It’s polite.” He was bewildered, not angry, and, while making
sympathetic noises, I started thinking about a character who depends on the
people around him to abide by strict rules of behavior and whose fragile world
is thrown into disarray when they don’t. I knew I wanted to explore and maybe
critique the very, very First World problems of such a character, and I knew I
wanted to use a certain crisp, clean, preppy New England vacation aesthetic as
a background for behavior that was neither crisp nor clean. So I wrote a very
bad short story, and then, two years later, I lived on Nantucket for eight
months (let the record show that they did not include the summer months) and
wrote the first draft of the novel.
Q: Throughout
SEATING ARRANGEMENTS, it often feels like we’re getting voyeuristic glimpses in
to the habits of the well-bred and ill-behaved. Where did you draw
inspiration for these characters and their antics?
The characters are all primarily invented, but I accessorized them with
bits and pieces borrowed from real people: choice phrases, descriptive details,
a delightfully strange first name. Sometimes a name or a line of dialogue is
enough to give a character shape, especially at the beginning. Then, the more
you write about a character, the more information you have about what he or she
would do, think, and feel in any given situation, and their antics start to
flow from their personalities. When you go back to the beginning of a draft to
revise, you suddenly know this person better than you did when you started and
can see all sorts of psychological inconsistencies and moments where the tone
wanders. The borrowed bits and pieces get crusted over with layers of invention
and eventually lose all connection to that poor real-life source who was
foolish enough to talk to a writer at a party.
Q: Patriarch
Winn Van Meter is a Harvard graduate who is obsessed with membership in all the
right clubs. As a Harvard graduate yourself, was club membership
something people took very seriously?
Harvard has an odd, retro system of social clubs called final clubs that
are exclusively male, are not funded or regulated by the university, own
spectacular Cambridge real estate, and admit members through a selective
process called punching. From what I observed, membership was a matter of absolute
and dire seriousness for some guys, but others had no interest in joining a
club or joined for reasons that didn’t go much deeper than wanting to have a
place to hang out with their friends. A handful of female final clubs have been
founded over the past twenty or so years, but because they don’t have the same
alumni resources or long traditions as the men’s clubs, they don’t seem to
confer the same status or occupy the same place in the collective Harvard
imagination. There’s an ongoing debate about the final clubs that will probably
never end. Some people think they’re incubating and perpetuating misogyny,
racism, economic segregation, homophobia, and other very bad things. Other
people argue that club members have special and unique bonds and create opportunities
for one another. I don’t begin to have the answers—I think, at the very least,
it’s problematic that men control so much of the social space at Harvard, but I
also see how, for lots of members, the clubs are harmless fun. Truth be told, I
was just glad to be a girl so I didn’t have to worry about getting punched or
not.
Q: To the
horror of his daughter, to whom he is toasting, Winn’s wedding toast equates
marriage with death. Was this intended as farcical or tragic and have you
previously experienced an awkward wedding toast such as this one?
I’ve never been in the audience for quite
such a downer of a wedding toast, but I would say a solid 30-40% of the ones I
have witnessed would qualify as awkward. Most people aren’t entirely
comfortable with public speaking, and when you mix in a lot of emotion and
alcohol, people can be unpredictable. I’ve seen a mother-of-the-groom catalog
the groom’s ex-girlfriends. I’ve seen a maid-of-honor catalog the bride’s
ex-boyfriends. I’ve seen a best man rewrite the lyrics of “American Pie” to be
an uncomfortable seven minute string of rhyming insults about the groom. I’m
generally ambivalent about the prospect of having a wedding of my own, but, if
I have one, toasts will be forbidden.
Q: There's a
great scene with an exploding whale. Does that actually happen??
It does! And let
that be a lesson to us all: don't get too close to a decomposing whale carcass.
When I was in high school, I read an article in the Los Angeles Times about
a scientist who had been killed while performing a necropsy on a whale. Gas
built up inside the corpse; it exploded, and this poor man was impaled by a
shard of bone. Not surprisingly, the story stuck with me, and when I started
drafting Seating Arrangements, I
decided early on to include an exploding whale. I didn’t have the plot mapped
out at all, but I was strangely confident there would be an opportunity
somewhere to work in the whale.
If you search on
YouTube, you’ll find some whale explosions, natural and otherwise. One of my
favorites is a classic news clip from 1970 about local authorities in Oregon
who didn’t know what to do with a dead grey whale and decided to blow it up
with dynamite . . . too much dynamite. Huge chunks of blubber rained from the
sky and crushed cars and terrified all the spectators who’d come out to see the
blast. Whales are just so impossibly large that I think there’s something
confrontational and compellingly grotesque about them when they’re dead. You
can’t ignore a dead whale; it’s a memento
mori on a gigantic scale.
Q: What
writers and novels inspire you?
There are too many to list! Day to day, I tend to read a lot of
nonfiction and am not great at staying on top of current fiction, but I have a
shelf of books at the ready for when I’m having trouble writing. I’ll pick one
up and read for a while, and often just a few pages of someone’s marvelous
prose will sort of get me in tune. The contents of the shelf rotates, but some
standbys are The Great Gatsby (duh), Brideshead Revisited, The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie, Lolita, Housekeeping, To the Lighthouse, Pride and Prejudice, Loving,
The Virgin Suicides, The Early Stories by John Updike, Selected Stories by Alice Munro, and The Stories of John Cheever. Lately I’ve been on simultaneous A.S.
Byatt and John Le Carré kicks, who write about very different subjects but are
both master stylists and are inspiring me to aspire to use the omniscient
voice. I’m also reading Michael Chabon’s new book, and I’ve been thinking about
how much I love the way the humor and beauty in his work starts on the diction
level. He routinely writes sad sentences that are made funny by one unexpected
word or vice versa. Reading his fiction reminds me that every word matters.
Q: When
did you first realize you loved to write?
Any day
now. Writing is difficult and takes forever, and I’m constantly aware that
I should always be looking harder and thinking harder. I don’t dislike the act
of writing—and I would feel lost and useless if I stopped doing it—but when
things are going well, the experience is more of focus than of enjoyment. I
love books, and I do love certain
things about the process of constructing characters and stories, like when the
solution to some structural problem suddenly becomes clear and I get a boost of
momentum. I also love the challenge of inventing characters who seem real to
me, and then I love trying to see through their eyes. The opportunity to be
someone else is one of the great pleasures of reading, and I’ve been surprised
that it’s a pleasure of writing as well.
On a practical
level, I started writing fiction in college more or less on a whim and then
applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop the year after graduation also pretty
much on a whim. When I got in, I immediately became much more serious about
improving my work, but I can’t remember any moment where I knew I wanted to be
a writer. It was more that I slowly figured out I didn’t want to be anything
else.
Q: What are you
working on next?
I just finished a novel that’s mostly about ballet. It’s all in present
tense but covers thirty years. There’s a Soviet defector. There’s Southern
California and Paris and New York. There’s some high drama. But, other than
that, I’m terrible at describing my own projects and should say no more. Next
I’d like to finish a couple short stories I’ve been toying with, one about the
Paris catacombs and one about an ocean liner. I like to mix it up.
This will be perfect for my 15 hour train ride.
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