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The black edge
Are athletes of African descent genetically superior?
By Gary Kamiya
[01/28/00]

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Outskirts of the fin de siècle
Five underappreciated novels from the last time the century turned.
By Phillip Lopate
[01/31/00]

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"The Delicious Grace of Moving One's Hand: The Collected Sex Writings" by Timothy Leary
Acid wasn't the only mindblower the '60s guru preached.
By Jonathan Miles
[01/31/00]

Ivory Tower
Smashing Violence
Violence studies is mobbed by students clamoring to shred "Pulp Fiction" and analyze suicide. But is this nascent field just intellectual rubbernecking?
By Annie Murphy Paul
[01/31/00]

Dear Mr. Blue
Tying the knot
Can a selfishly hedonistic guy find true domestic happiness after a life of frivolity?
By Garrison Keillor
[02/01/00]

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I couldn't think of anything to say that wasn't what other people said all the time. "Oh well, they're just genetically -- something or other." "They have such and such that makes them this way." I couldn't find a sentence like that that I like. I've heard white people say, "Well, they have this problem," which, even if it's true, I wasn't comfortable saying. So I didn't go in that direction. I didn't do any research on it, either.

There are all these explanations. The frontier was a culture of alcoholism -- no question about it. White frontier people and Indians shared this bond. It's like when you meet somebody you don't know very well and you say, "Let's have a drink." Once you've had two or three drinks you're the best buddies in the world. I think there was an awful lot of that -- "Well, he might look different, but he gets just as drunk as I do."

And I had another theory. Imagine you lived in a house and people moved in next door and they were the worst people you'd ever met in your life; your dog died and your plants died and your kids died ... Wouldn't you maybe just get really drunk and hope that they would go away?

I stopped drinking, and that is really important to me in the book. I don't know if the reader will notice it, but it meant a lot to me to have this idea of why sobriety is important. In the book I say, "If the devil exists, he's probably sober." And I really believe that. That's a huge change from the '60s. In the '60s, the devil was sober, so therefore -- get drunk. Now I would say the devil's sober, so you better watch it.

Your style has changed since "Great Plains." In that book the virtuosity is on the surface; you're really tap-dancing in front of people, having a great time and showing off. The virtuosity in this book is much more under the surface; it doesn't call attention to itself. Was that a conscious shift?

Well, "Great Plains" was done for the New Yorker. It came after years of writing for the "Talk of the Town" department, where the point was to do something splashy and funny and to catch people's attention -- especially when you knew that the rest of the magazine was very likely to be much weightier. I knew that "Great Plains" wasn't going to outweigh "The Fate of the Earth." The point was to be kind of flashy -- and also to catch Mr. Shawn's attention.

Shawn thought that when I went out West I had gone nowhere. And I kept getting that from a lot of people: "What is out there?" "I looked out the airplane window and there's nothing there." I was trying to say, "Oh, yes, there's definitely something here," and so I was more stylistically extreme.

The subject matter of "On the Rez" called for me to be more subdued. I felt a bit more cowed by a subject as heavy as death and suffering -- it just wasn't the place for doing something flashy and surprising. And I didn't find myself coming up with those stylistic ideas where you get the reader expecting something and then go completely in the other direction -- like in my profile of Heloise ["Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody," 1983], where I say, "I had not been in Texas long before I started having millions of insights about the difference between Texas and the rest of America. I was going to write these insights down, but then I thought -- nahhh."

I had that feeling -- that I knew people were expecting one thing and I would try to fake them out -- up until the last few years. I guess without the New Yorker, I became much more conservative. Also, as I've gotten older, I've come to believe that you should be able to tell a story with the words that are at hand. And that's how I do it.

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