Davies
sciously conceived as a whole" in the way your second book is, the second being arranged around this theme of love and obligation between parents and children. Yet I think you're right also w like the breadth of your first book, the way, as you've said before, it "surprises SWI)' by swry." However, today there's a 10[ of commercial pressure on SWI)' writers w make their colleecions somehow interconnectedby having the same characters, by exploring similar thematics. What's your opinion of the art of this practice? Do you feel your second book, because of its overall conception, is bener than your first? PHD: I think the second lx:xJk is nlOre of a book, not necessarily better, just more of a set. Ie's a collection that feels collected, whereas the other one was all of the good stuff I happened w have available, and I said, here it all is. I stand by that first lx:xJk. I love the swries in there, and I love the range of them. And there are little ways in which they bounce up against one another. You know, reviewers will tend W look for a theme, whether there is one or isn't, that links the various stories. The most ridiculous instance of this is that when the first book was reviewed in Britain, the headline of one of the reviews (a pretty good review, actually) was "Linked by Flatulence," because three of the swries featured, in very slight ways, a little bit of farting. They had my author phow, and the caption underneath said, "Peter Ho Davies-What's he smiling aboud" So it could be that I was a little scarred after that experience (laughing). I think in the second book I just wanted to do a slightly different thing. To be honest, I had not known that I was writing Equal Love until I had about two~thirds of the stories. I just thought, these are stories I happen to have. Maybe I'll sell them separately, and maybe a few years from now they'll be a collection. I really was trying to write a novel after Ugliest House. But my wife came across the Forster quote. She was reading that novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, which I'd read years before. We were talking with some friends about parentaV child questions, and my wife plucked that quote Out. I suddenly saw it as a crystal that falls into a super-saturated solution, where everything around it solidifies. Ie fit with the stories I had in hand and with a few other stories that I had in mind to write. The thing that I dislike, though, is the confusion of a novel and a story collection, which is particularly acute in Britain, where there are many fewer places to publish short fiction and where, consequently, the form is less well understood. Big magazines don't publish stories as much, and there arc very few small magazines. So I think there's a degree to which the British reading public is a little out of the habit of reading short fiction. When they pick up a collection, it looks like a 76
FUGUE #27