![]() ![]() While crime novels and mysteries readily involve down-and-out characters, literary fiction seems to pay little attention to it. Almost.Īt the risk of sounding like Esme in Salinger’s titular story, what I love about The Animals is that everybody is dead broke. North Idaho is where that big change happens or where Bill, the protagonist, tries to make it happen. So there’s a vein of The Mayor of Casterbridge and Lord Jim in this book. For me, the whole book is about trying to change the core self, the thing deep inside that is who we are. I’ve got two intertwined timelines in the book - three, if you consider the characters’ backstories in Battle Mountain, Nevada. My characters in The Animals come from that world, in a way, making one bad decision after another until they end up in an untenable situation. These are young people who made whole strings of truly terrible decisions, one after another, so that they find themselves, at some point, having duct-taped a family to their dining room chairs to rob them in broad daylight - an action you or I probably wouldn’t consider, but for them it’s often just the next logical step in a life of crime. I sometimes have students who have been in the prison system, and I became fascinated by their stories. It haunted me and wouldn’t keep quiet.Ī good part of what drove me toward the actual book are experiences I’ve had teaching at American River College in Sacramento. And yet there was that ending scene again. I tried to do a rewrite of Out of Iron at first, but it didn’t really come together. Maybe five years ago, I started a new novel that takes place in Napoleonic-era Europe, and at some point during that process I needed to step out of that world and into something else. It was a failed experiment, but one that stuck with me, especially the ending scene. PANIO GIANOPOULOS: Hard to believe I’ve never asked you this, but where did the idea for The Animals come from?ĬHRISTIAN KIEFER: I wrote a draft of a novel called Out of Iron about 10 or 15 years ago. We talked via email recently about his new novel, The Animals, as well as gender biases in literature, the art of the grizzly bear POV, and the inscrutable appeal of supermarkets. An old man wandered into the middle of the event, searching for a book on dream interpretation, and like magic, we’ve been great friends ever since. His first novel, The Infinite Tides, had recently been published. I FIRST MET Christian Kiefer at a 2013 reading we did together in San Francisco.
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