The Lunate Interview - Natasha Randall
Interview by Jess Moody
Natasha Randall is an American-English writer and translator, normally based in London, but currently hunkered down in the French Alps. A contributing editor to New York-based literary magazine A Public Space, her writing has appeared in numerous publications including Granta, the TLS and the New York Times. Her translations of Russian prose and poetry are widely acclaimed. Her 2020 debut novel, Love Orange, explored the unravelling of an American family living in their ‘smart-home’ in suburbia.
Your debut novel was released in 2020…in the middle of a global lockdown. What was that like?
When you publish your novel, there’s a little death in it: which is to say it ceases being yours, and it starts being everyone else's. So you mourn it a little bit when you're finished, and you give it away. What helps with that – with the closure of death, and the grief – is to see it in a bookshop in other people's hands. And I've never seen that. I’ve had this weird lack of closure. I look at it, the object, the book, on my desk and think: who are you? I don’t dare open it for fear I won’t recognise it.
There's been a lot of contact online between writers, and with readers - that's the only way anyone has felt any sense of connection, really. Something wonderful happened, where a whole load of ‘Debut 2020’ writers got together on Twitter. And it involved every kind of writer; from romance, to thriller, to magic, to historical fiction, all kinds of people. I think that would not ordinarily happen. Not in a normal year. What’s extraordinary is that the pandemic was such a leveller, for connection, and also for access to readings and lectures and other book people. I'm really hoping that continues: a lot of publishers and bookshops are saying they will keep putting things online so I have my fingers crossed.
The other thing that was really weird about publishing in the pandemic is that your books felt very dated. You were coming out with a book about ‘normal’ times that had no reference to the pandemic in it….So books felt immediately a little bit historical. And mine was set on the eve of the Trump era, just before all of this.
Interesting – so on the one hand there’s the worry about feeling ‘out of date’. And on the other, a book like Love Orange has so many timely questions in it about (dis)connection, loneliness, isolation - even the sense of a claustrophobic and surveilled household. Is there also the risk of a ‘pandemic readership’ labelling this as ‘prescient’? How would you feel about that?
I don't really own my book. I really don’t own the ideas in it. And I certainly didn't conjure them up in a vacuum. The more I write, the more I realise that everyone's just borrowing over time. As a translator, I know this anyway - you're borrowing text. But as a fiction writer, it's very evident to me that a lot of fiction writers, when they write themselves into a hole, they'll read around to ask ‘how do you get out of this hole? Oh, I know, I'll look at how Proust got out of that hole, I might try the way he got out’. My book came out of pop culture in a way. Pop culture mixed with Gogol. It has an episodic feeling to it: each chapter is it’s kind of is its own unit – they sort of stack, but you could read them as a series. There’s a thread that goes through, the story is very contiguous - I've just let the characters pass the story along like a baton, one at a time.
But I don't think that the ‘prescience’ that one might see in my book is actually to do with being any kind of genius! I just tapped into a vein and just went with it. I think a lot of people feel trapped in their lives, a lot of people feel trapped by the choices they may have made, choices that they didn't. Choices with consequences they couldn’t foresee. My protagonist, Jenny, really wasn't in control of the future she found herself within: a future in which she felt very trapped, overly defined as a wife and mother, and under-defined as an individual. The smart-house as a foil, competing with her to be the domestic goddess…I felt that it was interesting to have something that's supposed to make her life easier, but in fact, doesn't. A smart house doesn’t really disrupt the very strong sort of atomic forces that contain the nuclear family.
There are these deep, sometime quite dark, themes in the book. The opioid crisis is in there, the violence of video games, crises of masculinities - particularly with Hank, the husband. But you treated these with a lightness of touch and wit and humour, particularly when illuminating the flaws of the various characters. You’ve written elsewhere about the need for care to be take in tone here - how did you go about striking that right balance?
With this book I never considered a first-person narrative; I wanted that sort of prismatic look around the family. I achieved it mostly by going to each family member, dipping into their life: still from a third person perspective, but I stay very, very close to each of them in turn. And though, it feels very thorough and honest as a form, I think the effect of that is a bit of distancing for the reader. But I needed a prismatic and multifaceted look at this family as a unit, not just from the mother's perspective (it's quite hard to make domestic drudgery, and how stuck she’s feeling, interesting). I was interested to visit everybody else and to see whether they noticed how she felt… what they treated her like, how they felt themselves within the family. They each feel trapped. I didn't feel like having very personable characters that everyone would like: it isn’t a TV sitcom.
But this is the thing about tone: if the reader feels that you don't like your characters, I think you've lost your novel. I think you've lost the game, the tug. I don't think the novel will work. Because you can't write contemptuously about your characters. I think I skated a little bit close to the wind with Hank for example, because I think a lot of people found him truly awful as a myopic, macho type. But I did have him really trying to be his best self, and coming to some redemption towards the end.
Likewise, I didn't want to be forced to have to make everything turn out fine. I felt like there was a reality I was clinging to in which not everyone is likeable, and not everything turns out for the happy ending. I felt very unwilling to be shoved down any kind of narrative path by those pressures. In fact, I felt it would be a betrayal to my characters to resolve their terrible troubles so easily.
But still, all that said, I do think that my tone has a satirical edge. I did not have contempt for my characters, but I do feel the reader was perhaps invited to laugh at them. That's also kind of who I am. I mean, I invite people to laugh at me, I find life kind of ridiculous. I think we make serious decisions that can look completely ludicrous. We behave very oddly, according to our own logic, or our own traditions, or context.
You do leave them all with those kind of complexities, the contradictions in who they are, their choices…but also, as you’re saying, how we feel about them. That realism came across and kept its absurdity.
With the themes, someone else has said, ‘well wow, you had to put in feminism, and autism, and addiction, and a smart house, and plastic surgery, etc.’? But I don't think that's too many issues for one family. I think that's a pretty standard amount for any normal family.
The opioid addiction, I treated very lightly, in a very oblique way, because I don't think I was interested in writing ‘an addiction story’. I was more interested in how easily one might fall from a very normal situation into addiction. The title Love Orange refers to the drug: I write how this drug makes you feel loved…this kind of ‘cuddle love’, an embrace. that emotion is extremely hard to come by in a society where we all live in our smart homes, in our individual units, where there's certainly breakdown of community that may have made people feel more held. The nuclear family is not really that unit, it so often seems to isolate rather than to bind.
You talked earlier about your experiences as a translator: how do you think your experiences and skills there influenced you as a debut author of your own fiction?
I cannot tell you how much translating was the most extraordinary training for writing a novel. In so many ways, like sound, and cadence – which is something I think of a lot when I translate. When I read a sentence in a foreign language, I really want to capture the ease with which you can say it or not. Does it have very short sentences that feel very staccato? Does it feel very elongated? Is it giving the reader a chance to breathe? Or a chance to settle? Is it heightening some kind of tension? Is it reflecting the character of the person who's been described?
And there's so much to bear in mind when you translate: what you do in a bid to be faithful, and to be loyal; to do the best job you can for the author's sake. Take word choice: to know whether to use the word ‘glittering’ or ‘sparkling’? What's the slight distinction there? What do they really want to say? I have translated four or five books and I feel that what it gave me was a tremendous care.
It's a much, much more lateral space to work with in your own book. You can just go, ‘well, I just prefer the word ‘glittering’ to ‘sparkling’: I love the way that that describes the fact that they've been swimming, which I'm not going to connect directly.
But I'll tell you something that translation does not help you with at all, which is plot. You don't have to decide anything, you just have to go to the next sentence. Whereas writing a novel is so freeform: I'm in the woods, and I can turn left or right or not… and that felt extremely ‘unmoored’ originally. At the beginning of a novel, there's very much this sense of which way am I going? However, I think most novelists find that. I don't think that's a translator’s curse.
But, yes, I don't have a great sense of spinning a yarn with tremendous structure. So that would be my weakness, and sort of underdeveloped. The developed aspects of my writing, I would say, are thanks to the translation, that sort of ‘crutch’ of the received text.
What are you working on next? Or currently?
I'm writing a novel about translation. I am. I don't know why... No, I do know why. Because it's something I know so much about. It's feels like I can do it. Love Orange wasn't autofiction – it was nothing to do with my life. This one - I suppose it's a book that I may have a certain amount of trouble with, in terms of dramatic tension: because I'm not sure everybody feels language to be such a tense environment as I do. But somehow, it's about translation and life. There're a million metaphors for translation, right? Translation is like chaperoning. Translation is like memorialising. Translation is like putting something through an algorithm. Translation is being a doctor. It's also something that you can just use to play with, in terms of the novel: it is an exploration of all of these metaphors.
It’s set in New York, where I used to live (I'm half American) around 9/11. I really expected already to be finished with it. And I really, really haven't. I sort of was hoping the pandemic in my very rural spot would be something of a retreat, but it just isn't: as everybody knows, life’s full of its various other distractions, ruminations. So, yeah, I'm just trying to get that done.
Love Orange is published by Hachette and is available now