Interviews

Q: Fierce Invalids from Hot Climates is an unusual title. How did you come up with it?
A: Actually, I excerpted it from a poem by the legendary French literary rebel Arthur Rimbaud. While it has quite literal significance within the context of my plot, it has wider meanings, as well. All of us who've managed to survive intense love affairs, political confrontations, or periods of personal debauchery might be said to be fierce invalids home from hot climates.

Q: Is that what the new novel is about?
A: It's about the CIA, the Virgin Mary, and the man who loves, hates, and redefines them both.

Q: What else?
A: It's about the possibility in today's world of combining a life of freewheeling sensuality and high adventure with a life of serenity, deep wisdom, and full consciousness.

Q: Could you be more specific?
A: Well, it's about a maverick secret agent and how he finds innocence and fun in a corrupt and dangerous world, has a deadly curse put on him, flirts with spiritual enlightenment, and learns to appreciate older women. That's as specific as I'm prepared to get. It's not that I'm being coy; I just don't want to spoil any surprises for the reader. I mean, aren't you sick of those film previews that give so much away you feel like you've already seen the movie twice? In my novels, the story line is so tightly integrated with the philosophy and the style (the language, itself) that to separate any one of those elements from the other two is to paint a false picture. Plot details taken out of context can seem "zany" (God, how I've come to dislike that word!), whereas, in point of fact, in the tapestry of the book, they not only make perfect sense but can perhaps cast an illuminating light on the nature of reality and what passes for the human condition.

Q: How does Fierce Invalids differ from your previous six novels?
A: It has a little less estrogen and a little more testosterone. As usual in my work, there are some strong female characters, but the main protagonist is a man. A rascally, contradictory, 21st-century Renaissance man.

Q: Why in the past have you usually favored female protagonists?
A: All my life I've cherished the company of females. It takes me 36 to 42 months to complete a novel. If you're going to be shut up in a room with someone every day for three years, it might as well be with someone whose company you enjoy.
Equally important is the fact that employing women as my primary protagonists has allowed me to step outside of myself far more easily than were I to look at events from a masculine perspective -- and I'll go to almost any length to avoid the stain of autobiography.

Q: You say your work is not autobiographical, and it certainly doesn't fit into any of the genre categories. How would you describe it, then?
A: It's a hallucinogen, an aphrodisiac, a mood elevator, an intellectual garage-door opener, and a metaphysical trash compactor: It'll do everything except rotate your tires.

Q: You've often mentioned your interest in Zen, Taoism, Tantra, and other Asian philosophies, but you obviously are also fascinated with American pop culture.
A: There's a link there, really. With the exception of Tantric Hinduism, every religious system in the modern world has denied and suppressed sensuality. Yet sensual energy is the most powerful energy we as individuals possess. Tantric saints had the genius and the guts to exploit that energy for spiritual purposes. Food, drink, drugs, music, art, poetry, and especially sex, are used in Tantra in a religious manner. Tantrikas perfect the techniques of sensual pleasure and use the energy released as fuel for their God-bound vehicle, their rocket ride to enlightenment.
Pop culture, in somewhat the same way, may be exploited for serious purposes. American pop has great energy, humor, vitality, and charm. It baffles me that so many serious novelists are reluctant to take advantage of that. When it comes to revitalizing the human spirit, sensitizing experience, and marrying a sense of wonder to the terrible truth, pop culture has infinitely more literary potential than, say, bad marriages, abusive childhoods, and psychopathic violence -- the favorite subjects of the academic and the dour.

Q: When and why did you start writing?
A: I started before I was old enough to know any better. My muse was a cradle robber, a child molester. She seduced an innocent, blue-eyed, towheaded, preliterate tot and turned him into a paragraph junkie. As a child, I wrote countless stories. In adolescence, I stopped creating fiction and channeled all that energy into basketball and cheerleaders, still two of my favorite things. Later, I expanded my enthusiasms to include journalism, art, mythology, psychedelic drugs, la belle époque, and various Asian schools of philosophy. Then, when I was about 32, I ran into my old love, Mademoiselle Fiction, and we have been inseparable ever since.

Q: What were you like as a child?
A: Well, I was all the Simpson siblings rolled into one. Like Bart Simpson, I was a rambunctious little troublemaker. At the same time, like Lisa, I was a highly sensitive, creative, artistic type. There was something of Maggie in me, as well, but I can't quite put my finger on it. There's probably a lot of the Simpson kids in me still.

Q: At what point do you think you are in your career?
A: Beats me. I've never considered that I have a career. I have a careen.

Q: What kind of books do you like to read?
A: In terms of subject matter, my literary taste is wildly eclectic (although I could survive quite nicely for several more lifetimes without reading another coming-of-age novel or neurotic saga of a dysfunctional family). The one thing I demand of an author is that he or she cares -- really cares -- about language. In general, I prefer the daring to the cautious, the poetic to the prosaic, the imaginative to the literal, the upbeat to the dreary, the quirky to the predictable, the comic to the sober, and the erotic to the chaste.

Q: How does it feel to be named one of "The 100 Best Writers of the 20th Century" by Writer's Digest magazine?
A: I'm sincerely flattered, but I'm old enough to know that if you allow yourself to puff up over your accolades, you're going to have to pay with your soul. Frankly, I was more excited when the celebrated Italian critic, Fernanda Pivano, called me "the most dangerous writer in the world today."

Q: What did she mean by that?
A: Well, I know she intended it as a compliment. According to Signora Pivano, what I've been saying in my work is that love and beauty and freedom are all that matter in life and that everything else is just a joke. For the self-satisfied, the money-crazed, and the unreflective, I suppose that is a dangerous message. The signora may be on to something. I admit I wouldn't mind pulling the rug out from under readers in such a way as to fracture their belief systems -- but only if it leaves them feeling better than ever about simply being alive.