We're a culture that's obsessed with people who make and who squander ridiculous amounts of wealth, which seemed an obsession well worth interrogating in a novel. That probably accounts for what some have called the book's "sweeping" feel, but I don't know that I set out to be cinematic. I wouldn't know how to do that in a novel, specifically.

Matthew Specktor

Categorized in : People Culture Ridiculous

Hollywood is famous for breeding monsters, and having worked in the business, I've known a lot of them. But only intermittently have I ever found them monstrous. They have many other qualities.

Matthew Specktor

quality

A Good Soldier is one of my favorite novels, for various reasons. But the class question is a good one, because it's not always easy to empathize with privileged people.

Matthew Specktor

my-favorite soldier people

The '90s were a time when not just the movie business, but every aspect of American life, became a lot more corporate. There's a line in Jonathan Franzen's essay "Perchance to Dream" about how "the rich lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single vertical drama, that of commercial generality." I wanted to examine that great homogenizing force that came in during the '90s, since Hollywood seemed a place where it was particularly active.

Matthew Specktor

rich dream drama

Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.

Matthew Specktor

understanding

I think it's what fiction is for: to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones.

Matthew Specktor

secret thinking

I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.

Matthew Specktor

scene writing

I like writing sentences. It's tactile and exciting. Whereas working at the level of the scene is a more cerebral pleasure.

Matthew Specktor

pleasure scene writing

I grew up with such mixed feelings about LA, but I do love it. I grew up lectured by Woody Allen, for example, that LA was absurd, worthy of ridicule and contempt. Most people seem to describe Los Angeles as elementally despicable, or as someplace that requires an apology.

Matthew Specktor

apology feelings people

People don't seem to have a problem with a romanticized New York, in fact that's almost all they ever do, in some sense, is romanticize that place. Los Angeles deserves the same courtesy.

Matthew Specktor

los-angeles problem people

My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.

Matthew Specktor

patient parent littles

I think the publishing industry is dismayingly like the movie business. It grows more corporate by the day.

Matthew Specktor

publishing grows thinking

It's hard to imagine there's a place for great writing inside a multinational conglomerate.

Matthew Specktor

multinationals imagine writing

I heard a story the other night about an editor who visited the Iowa Workshop and, when asked what sorts of books she published, replied, "Classic books." One of the students asked her, "You mean like Kafka?" Apparently she said, "Oh, I don't think I would publish Kafka."

Matthew Specktor

night mean book

There was a moment when the Berlin Wall came down and some people felt, "Oh capitalism won. That's the ideology we can believe in now."

Matthew Specktor

wall believe people

During the 90s, I watched a lot of people getting fat and prosperous, and I thought, culture itself is the casualty of this.

Matthew Specktor

casualties culture people

These are the kind of movies that only a real apparatchik, someone who thinks that corporations are people, could love.

Matthew Specktor

real people thinking

I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.

Matthew Specktor

writing fiction thinking

It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time

Matthew Specktor

know-how novel enough

Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him. I'm more interested in what's meaningful within the lives of individuals. And fiction will always be central to the lives of certain people, which is all that matters.

Matthew Specktor

meaningful people fiction

I think being central to the culture is overrated. Who really gives a damn if something is popular? Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him.

Matthew Specktor

giving people thinking