< 13 Heaven knows, Mr. Krasny bitten, and it hasn’t let up. I still don’t understand how you have time to read four or five books a week. I’m always reading. By the way, I also prepare for classes. I have a life. People assume I don’t have a life. But even on weekends when I’m away, on vacation, I’m still reading. It’s like having a shop that’s open seven days a week. Since it’s not something I find burdensome—quite the contrary—it works. When you’re going around the country talking to people about your book, are you finding that the interviewers have read it? I’ve learned through the years that most interviewers, especially on television, don’t read books. I used to say, “Larry King never reads the book. I almost always read the book. That’s why he’s rich and famous.” There’s something to that boilerplate line. Are you still affiliated with a synagogue? Not anymore. When the cantor and rabbi at Sherith Israel retired, I left. The kids were adults. What do you do for the holidays? I go to services, pay through the nose. I like the ritual and the music. I like the feelings that are frankly aroused in me, that bring me back to my boyhood and my idea of faith. I think agnosticism, for me, gives you license to say, whatever I get out of it, even if it’s just the music and the ritual, it has value. It doesn’t have to necessarily be tied to a higher power. I make a distinction between Judaism and Jewishness. It’s not mine; it’s Philip Roth’s. One is a religion, and it’s a religion tied to monotheism. But Jewishness is something else. It’s tradition, heritage, ritual. For many people, it’s Israel, and so forth and so on. A lot of people were looking for substitutes after the Holocaust, when a lot of people said, How can we believe in God if the Holocaust happened? So you had Zionism replacing God. For many people, feminism, socialism. These, to me, were all kind of replacements for the Messiah that didn’t come. That’s my thesis, for what it’s worth. Who is reading Spiritual Envy? It’s like my radio program. A lot of people think NPR is gray listeners. NPR is a very wide demographic. I left KGO and went over to KQED, and in a few years was actually beating my former employer, with some degree of satisfaction, in terms of the 18-to-32 demographic. And that was the demographic KGO told you that you weren’t appealing to? Exactly. There was a real sense of justice, vindication. But it seems that the people who are really keying into the book are the NPR crowd, what you used to joke and call the overeducated crowd, people who are interested in ideas. It strikes me that they’re people who are curious people, thoughtful people, thinkers, maybe skeptics, seekers. But also I’ve had this wonderful response from people of faith. The Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley invited me over to give a talk, and it was 14 PACIFIC SUN NOVEMBER 26 - DECEMBER 2, 2010
really well received. I’m invited to talk to United Religions International, the Unitarians, a Texas Christian university. I thought the book would interest adolescents. From your lips to God’s ears. That’s where the real sales are these days. I had real good crowds at bookstores. But I went to the Booksmith in the Marina, and it was the smallest crowd. I talked to the owner afterward, and he said Julianne Moore was here a couple weeks ago, and she didn’t have many more than you did, and Jenny McCarthy had maybe just a few more than you did. But Tori Spelling had 500 people. Can you talk about why you see yourself as a failure as a novelist? I really wanted to be a novelist, and I guess I just didn’t have the chops. I had, certainly, the literary background, maybe the writing abilities and the work ethic. But you really need a certain imagination to put the form of the novel to work. You can’t just write autobiographically or like a scholar or a journalist. There’s some extra ingredient, a big extra ingredient. One of the nicest things I heard about this was, “Mark Twain said the greatest writers are the greatest liars. Maybe you just had trouble because you had to tell the truth a lot.” But I think it was a sort of failure of imagination. I wanted to be Saul Bellow, Hemingway or Faulkner, Tony Morrison, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. Pretty high standards. That may have been the problem. I did publish some stories early on in my career as an academic in some nice literary magazines. I just didn’t have whatever it was for fiction, to stay at it. And I tried, really tried, just like I tried to find God. Do you think if something cataclysmic rocked your world, your beliefs would change? Life does have a tendency to blindside us. But belief is a hard thing to predict. Christopher Hitchens is dying now, and he’s a stone-cold atheist. He said if I somehow come around to God, you should know it’s not me. It’s the chemo and the radiation talking. There are countless examples of people coming to a higher belief in times of need. I’ll bet those miners in Chile, if they weren’t believers before, were pretty strong believers when they saw the light of day. But the argument could be advanced that the only reason they saw the light of day was because of some guy in Pennsylvania who invented the new technology to bore through. Yet it seemed miraculous. I would have liked to have had something tantamount to a mystical experience. I would have liked to have come to understand a higher power. A lot of that subjective or inner proof is in the heart or is in faith, and I would have welcomed that proof if it had come to me. ✹ Contact Ronnie Cohen at ronniecohen@comcast.net.
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