'Anna' Begins: Jill Bialosky

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JILL BIALOSKY IS reading at Politics & Prose on Thursday, but she said that "The Life Room," her new novel, "doesn't have any political content. I think they often invite literary writers."

Bialosky is unquestionably a "literary writer." An acquisitions editor for W.W. Norton & Co., she has published two books of poetry, a previous novel ("House Under Snow") and written for the New Yorker.

"The Life Room" is a portrait of the fictional Eleanor Cahn, a woman accurately described as a "Lit Chick" in the New York Times review. Cahn is an Ivy League professor married to a heart surgeon, with whom she has two young children. When Steven Mason — her childhood neighbor and lifelong unrequited love — asserts himself into her present, Cahn's seemingly perfect world is thrown into turmoil. She struggles to reconcile her devotion to her husband with her fear that she will never connect with him on the as she does with Steven does.

Rife with allusions as well as foreshadowed yet satisfying surprises, "The Life Room" is a novel that takes on the formidable task of laying bare the interior life of a conflicted woman.

Express talked to Bialosky about "Anna Karenina," playing with narrative and the importance of first love.

» EXPRESS: One of the most interesting things about your novel is its form. It's a contemporary narrative framing many flashbacks, an 80-page journal entry and both e-mail and voicemail messages. What inspired you to arrange your book this way?
» BIALOSKY: I wanted to create an intimate portrait of a character, Eleanor Cahn, and I wanted to create a character who doesn't have to die for her passions — who can negotiate both her domestic and her passionate world.

The form just unfolded. I think plot is informed by character and I wanted to put a roadblock on my character's domestic life — which on the surface seemed so idyllic. The roadblock was having her reconnect with a person from her past; they shared an unrequited desire. I felt to really understand the character, we had to understand her erotic past, so I began to fold in the three other characters: Adam, Steven and William.

I chose the first-person journals when Eleanor went to Paris because the rest of the novel is very close third person and I wanted to get even more inside her inner life. The e-mail exchanges and voice messages that also became part of the narrative, I felt were very much keeping with modern life and I wanted the novel to have that feel.

» EXPRESS: I appreciated that.
» BIALOSKY: Good, because Eleanor is, in some ways, an old-fashioned character, in that this is a character who has a strong moral sense and is very conflicted. That was something that fascinated me. We live in a time where adultery and transgression seem so commonplace. I wanted to explore the internal struggle on that journey.

» EXPRESS: Eleanor is a Tolstoy professor and references to "Anna Karenina" are sprinkled liberally throughout your book. Will people who have not read "Anna Karenina" fail to understand things in your novel?
» BIALOSKY: I don't think so. If you read "Anna Karenina," there might be another mini-layer to discover in my book. I certainly was playing with some of the ideas in "Anna Karenina" — the moral dilemma, the spiritual struggle — but Tolstoy has written a sprawling, epic novel and "The Life Room" is really an exploration of a character's inner-life. I was toying with the idea of a character who has written a paper on Anna Karenina's sense of morality and begins to question her ideas.

» EXPRESS: I found Eleanor's reconnection with her first love very true to life. That seems to happen frequently. Do you think that's something a lot of readers will relate to?
» BIALOSKY: I do. Our past relationships don't really go away. People that are not in our lives but affected us deeply are still part of our consciousness. Time and again, you hear stories of people in middle age who reconnect with their high school sweethearts — and that's the person they have their second marriage with. I've also discovered that people from the past tend to come out of the woodwork at this stage in life. People who you haven't been in touch with for 10 or 15 years can reappear and potentially turn one's life upside down.

» EXPRESS: Eleanor's husband, Michael, struck me as a somewhat one-dimensional character. Do you think that's true?
» BIALOSKY: I didn't want him to be a one-dimensional character. ... What interested me more was the characters who were driving Eleanor away from Michael. He doesn't have a large back-story, because he's so much in her present life. For her to really know him — because the novel is seen through her eyes — I don't think she could really know him until many years later.

This is one of the conceits I was thinking of: It's very hard sometimes to intimately know people who are in our lives on a daily basis, but it's much easier when we're able to think back on people and who they were when they're not emotionally affecting us. That was in my mind with Michael.

» EXPRESS: I think a key passage in your book comes when you write, "Why couldn't she think of any models in literature who valued their families, but who still had needs apart from them?" With Eleanor Cahn, are you attempting to provide that model?
» BIALOSKY: Yes, I am. I really was trying to show what that struggle might look like and what her options might be.

» Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW; Thu., 7 p.m., free; 202-364-1919. (Van Ness-UDC)

Written by Express contributor Tim Follos
Photo by Marion Ettlinger