Editor's Note: (Tess Taylor is the author of the poetry collections "Work & Days," "The Forage House" and most recently, "Rift Zone" and "Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange." Views expressed in this commentary are solely hers. Read more opinion articles on CNN.)
(CNN) Somewhere in the middle of "Homeland Elegies," the sprawling, ambitious novel published earlier this year by playwright Ayad Akhtar, the main character of the novel, who is also a playwright called Ayad Akhtar, is speaking to his mentor, a college professor named Mary Moroni, who suggests that he write down his dreams. "The more you can dwell along the weave, feel the lattice work, the closer you'll be to the vital, vivid stuff," she advises him.
"Homeland Elegies," a story about a son attempting to make sense of his father, as well as a young playwright coming of age while reckoning with his country, is certainly vital, but it explores a latticework of American life that is frayed at the seams in ways neither the author nor his readers could have foretold.
In the weeks just after the 2020 presidential election, as coronavirus cases were on a terrifying rise -- and just after "Homeland Elegies" was selected as one of the Top 10 Books of 2020 by The New York Times -- Akhtar spoke with poet and CNN contributor Tess Taylor about writing, outrage and the future of the arts in a time of crisis.
The conversation began by phone and continued over email. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and flow.
Tess Taylor: You're a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and your novel "Homeland Elegies" features a character named Ayad Akhtar, who is, as it happens, also a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. How did you sense that this material was becoming a novel, instead of — as could easily be imagined — a memoir, or, a play?
Ayad Akhtar: Plays can do things that fiction can't do as well; and vice versa. It was always clear to me that I needed to be *close* to the reader, to be able to whisper in the reader's ear, to be able to use a muscular literary American English to address the broken nature of our politics. It seemed to me that, in a play, I wouldn't be able to get my head and heart and language around the vastness of the problem, the enormity of the portrait. The novel is the best form for that.
Taylor: Fiction is an alternate place for getting at truth. And: We've also certainly lived through an era of sifting many fraught fictions. But back to truth: The Ayad Akhtar in the book has a couple of elaborate writing rituals, including sleeping with a pencil taped to his hand so he can wake up and record his dreams, as well as making notes of each day's events for an hour or so each evening. Which of these do you follow? What's your own routine or practice or ritual like? And: do you sleep with a pencil taped to your hand?
Akhtar: My alter ego, if that's the word, in the book is a more diligent creature than me. That said, there was a period in my mid-20s that I kept assiduous record of my nightly dreaming. I have literally thousands of dreams from that time, pages and pages of them piled up in boxes. I have also been a keeper of a daily journal, though not as rigorously as the narrator of the book. My only real enduring writing ritual is to be at my desk in the morning, 9 AM to 2 PM, usually. It's a standing date with my writing life, mostly so that the muse knows where to find me!
Taylor: These different stories — from the evolving relationship between the son (your alter ego Ayad) and his father; to a billionaire banker named Riaz who sells debt in small American towns; to a failed romance — all overlap with one another in a series of staggered timelines in your book. The narratives weave against one another, exploring some profound moments of loss and as well as of hunger to belong. I was remembering that elegy comes from the Greek aulos, the flute of mourning that gets played in a funeral procession. What do you think is getting mourned in these elegies?
Akhtar: The book is mourning not only the passing of my parents -- my mother in 2017, my father in 2019 -- but of the American nation that they came to 50 years ago. That country is gone, and part of its passing has to do with what has happened to the American heartland, where I grew up in Wisconsin, and which is also being mourned in the book. Not to mention the homeland that my parents left, their original homeland in Pakistan, and which is now no longer a part of my life, as it was only through them that I really knew it.
Taylor: I was struck by the line that "a writer needs a sufficient store of rage to sustain the will to write." Talk to me about the role of anger in making this book.
Akhtar: That's a line I remember reading from someone quoting William Gaddis, one of America's great authors. Seeing the despoiling of our country, our lack of care for locality, our preoccupation with individual flourishing at the expense of community, all of this has been something I've been witnessing for some time. Related to this corrosion is the more recent, precipitous decline in critical thinking, the substitution of advertising for art, and the conquering rise of the entertainment model of politics.
I felt I had come to a point that I had to speak, and it turned out that that speaking was something closer to a howl. I found that precision in the language could corral the anger, widen the emotional scope, deepen the stakes -- but at root, the book is articulating a profound outrage.
Taylor: Yes, we have lived through an era of great outrage in this country. We've also just had a nail-biter of a national election. What do you imagine the work ahead to be?
Akhtar: I worry that we are seeing an organic dissolution of the foundations of our republic; an organic dissolution occasioned by decades of policy that have elevated American corporations to quasi-aristocratic status in our political order. Citizens United is a reflection of this emerging political order. I am not sure we will be able to stop the further crumbling of our foundations, and I certainly don't think that there is a widespread understanding of what is actually going on.
Taylor: You've recently become the president of PEN America, which defends freedom of expression and celebrates literature as a vital part of our national discourse.
Tell me what you're most excited to do in that role.
Akhtar: Above all, I'm hoping to continue to support literature as a significant contribution to our national life. Too often, these days, what passes for discourse is of a uniquely ephemeral nature, tends to the superficial, and is predicated on mere contrast, not rich contradiction. Literature presupposes deep reading, deep engagement, duration, and the ability to hold opposing ideas concurrently. I think it matters now more than ever.
Taylor: I've been interested not only in the arts as articulating outrage, but also being a site for civic repair. I was touched, for instance, that the Ayad-of-the-book made a point of donating money to small local libraries in his home state of Wisconsin. Tell me what role do the arts and artists have to play in healing the breach?
Akhtar: I would like to think that, in this time of extraordinary specialization of knowledge, art and artists can serve a synthesizing role; bringing together disparate languages and practices, areas of knowing, and therefore to show us all a clearer more expansive picture of what we are, and where we appear to be headed. In short, I think that artists need to sound the alarm, but also need to look to a bigger picture than many expect from them.