“Invasion of the Martians,” your story in this week’s issue, involves a Texas senator’s run-in with some illegal immigrants from Mars. There are a number of ways to read the story and relate it to our current political situation. Did you intend a specific interpretation?
The genesis of the story predates the current electoral melodrama in the U.S., but no doubt the final tale has been colored by it. I first toyed with the basic notion while I was working on my story collection “A Night at the Movies,” exploring B-movies and comic books for ideas. The “invading strangers” topos took on more immediacy during last year’s refugee crisis in Europe, where I was living at the time, and then, with the political grandstanding on the same issue in this country, provoked by the legal and rhetorical battle between Congress and the President regarding the porous borderlands of Texas and the Southwest. So, yes, to that extent, the story became partly “about” illegal immigration. I chose an ambitious, self-adoring senator from Texas as my point-of-view hero somewhat before the actual Texas senator, certainly no hero at all (though also afflicted with self-adoration), decided to run for President, but the Presidential campaigns probably did infect the rhetoric of the story. Events sometimes step on stories-in-progress that way. In 1976, I was completing my novel “The Public Burning,” which was about the execution of the Rosenbergs, in 1953. Even though almost all the “characters” in the book were living persons and my principal narrator was President Richard Nixon, the twenty-some years that had passed seemed enough of a gap that history wouldn’t harass me. And then Watergate happened. And a complete rewrite began.
The senator tells the Martians that Texas is always ready to welcome “self-supporting and well-behaved guests.” Is that a jab at anyone in particular?
It’s more a jab at policy and policy-makers of all persuasions.
This invasion of otherness is emasculating to the senator; it puts his whole persona at risk. He’s full of bluster, but you seem to feel a certain degree of sympathy for him. Or don’t you?
This phenomenon is true of all authors and their characters. (See Richard Nixon again.) For God so loved his villains that He raised them all to positions of murderous power, while promising the suffering masses He’d send the bullies to Hell when they were dead. If He didn’t forget.
What do the Martians actually want? Will they be coming back?
They want to colonize Earth, presently populated by ignorant, self-destructive primitives. Thus the whooshing of the senator. Plant the seed. They may come back. Or they may decide that the planet is fatally diseased and try somewhere more promising.
You’ve spent the past few years working on a novel, “Huck Out West,” that’s a kind of sequel to “Huckleberry Finn.” (It comes out in January.) What inspired you to take on Twain?
“Huckleberry Finn,” though flawed, is a great American novel, thanks mainly to Huck’s voice. I’ve often taught it, or, rather, allowed it to do the teaching. I grew up near where Twain grew up, and all his voices were voices I heard, too. Twain was a somewhat racist white boy (he belonged to Confederate militias in the early days of the looming conflict) who was changed for the better by his own writing—another phenomenon that many writers have shared, growing into their own best selves. Twain grew up among African-Americans, mostly slaves, and he learned to love them, but Native Americans were another story—a story he actually began, called “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians.” Very early in his narrative, the savages reveal their irredeemably vicious nature by massacring everybody in sight, and, soon after that, probably because it had in effect dead-ended, Twain abandoned the story. I decided to take up his notion of Huck and Tom heading West just before the American Civil War, seeing the horror of the time through Huck’s eyes, while retaining the feel of “A Boy's Adventure Story.”
Did writing about late-nineteenth-century America make you think (or write) differently about America today?
I probably worry more that America today is making me think (or write) differently about late-nineteenth-century America. The story starts at the outbreak of the Civil War and ends with the Deadwood Gold Rush. This era, not the Revolutionary period, was what truly made us who we are. It was an adventurous time, but also one full of greed, virulent hatreds, religious insanity, the slaughter of war and its aftermath, widespread poverty and ignorance, ruthless military and civilian leadership, and huge disparities of wealth. Not a pretty history. But I hoped that Huck’s sympathetic and gently comical voice might make it bearable.
