Justin Cronin: The Passage
by Ryan Stewart for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

It’s close to the year 2020. America’s slow, arduous decline is accelerating thanks to a protracted war with Iran and other ill-conceived military adventures. Interior states now have their own border checkpoints, manned by farm boys in Kevlar vests. GovTV comes with your standard cable package. What few technological and scientific advances have occurred seem to be exclusively in the realm of surveillance and gadgetry, but that’s about to change. At its most secretive levels, the government is running tests on an ultra-rare Bolivian virus that appears to have an incredible property, namely the ability to affect the thymus gland in a way that results in deceleration of the aging process. A project codenamed “Noah” is commissioned, and death row inmates in prisons across the country begin to find themselves being shuttled out of their cells hours before their executions, bundled into vans with blacked-out windows and disappeared.
Meanwhile, this hardened world is wearing down one single mother in Iowa as she slips through the cracks, going from a waitressing job to mopping floors to turning tricks at roadside motels while her six year-old daughter stays locked in the bathroom. Soon Amy – an extraordinary little girl with the ability to communicate with animals – will find herself alone in a world that’s coming apart at the seams. A world in which the government will be powerless to halt what it began, and in which the final editions of newspapers will scream headlines like “Chicago Falls.” And all this is just the sprawling prologue to Justin Cronin’s new 800-page epic, The Passage. Time is what the title refers to – the book’s main story begins only many years after the dust of a worldwide cataclysm has settled, and a new epoch in human history has been christened as A.V. SuicideGirls recently called up Justin Cronin in a Midwestern hotel to discuss the book.


Ryan Stewart: I just finished the book last night, and I guess my first question is: Governor Jenna Bush? Is that even possible?
Justin Cronin: [laughs] Well, the easy answer is no. I put that in there at a moment when I just needed a governor for the state of Texas. I did put it in there as a kind of joke, but I wasn’t quite sure what the joke was even when I did it. On some level I just liked the idea of a governor named Jenna. I got a call from my British editor, and he had two questions about the Bushisms in the book: One was that he was very concerned that there was no way they would name Houston’s major airport after George Bush, after the last eight years, and I had to explain to him that it already was, in fact, the name of the airport. It’s named for his father, though. And also the governor thing, and what I said to him about that was “Yes, I get that it’s far-fetched, but anyone who thinks it’s impossible doesn’t know anything about the dynastic nature of Texas politics.” But yeah, some people have said it’s the most horrifying part of the book! Make of it what you will.
RS: Would it be fair to say your intuition about our near future is not overly optimistic, even without vampires?
JC: I’m a parent, and as a parent you’ve got to stay optimistic. But the book is an expression of anxieties of various kinds. They’re the anxieties I’ve had since I was a kid, and I think they’re the same anxieties a lot of people of my generation have. I grew up in the Cold War -- I was born in 1962. I literally came home in a basket and then the Cuban Missile Crisis happened. The Cuban Missile Crisis is taught in school now, but what they don’t really say is that it was absolutely the most dangerous moment in the history of human civilization. There is no question about it, nothing else even comes close. And I was a baby, so it didn’t bother me at all then, but sometimes I think that something about it just went straight into my DNA. So, yeah, I grew up very, very worried, as we all did in that era. I grew up underneath a very dark cloud. The difference between the Cold War era and the era we live in now is a question of clarity. The only good thing about the Cold War is that we knew exactly what to be afraid of. It was very clear and nothing else could compare, you know? Twenty thousand warheads all pointed at each other. But since 9/11 there’s been a danger out there, but we just don’t know what form it will take. We’re living in times of great stress and anxiety about all kinds of things, and I wanted to try to wrap all of these things into a single form. But you don’t write a book like this because you think that’s what the future is going to be like. In a sense, it’s not forecasting. It’s like when audiences first went to see Oedipus; one of the reasons you read a book like this is so that you can come out the other side and know that you’re still safe. And like I said before, as a parent I must be an optimist. The future I will not live to see is the one my kids will live in.
RS: Did you read Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us or any other books of that kind, to get a sense of what the world would be like after a hundred years of neglect?
JC: The Weisman book I did read some of, but I’m not sure if I read the whole thing. But I have to be careful, because when I write a book I try not to read other books that would overly influence my project in various ways. For instance, I didn’t read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which came out when I was beginning this novel, because he’s such a distinctive stylist and I knew that we would kind of be working in a similar vein. Mostly I just sat down and concentrated really hard. I used a lifetime of knowledge I had accumulated about things and materials and people to figure it out and make good decisions. For instance, I used the Southwest because it’s dry and the moisture is what wipes things away. Houston would dissolve like a pill in water in a hundred years. Some structures would not, of course – the last thing standing will be the freeways. But a small town in a desert region of Southern California would just be slowly buried. You’d still have mummified corpses because they’d have dried out so quickly, particularly if they were in cars. I wanted to use a region of the world where the ruins of the past would be more vividly present. So, I did a lot of research, but a lot of it was just me being forty-seven and having thought about a lot of this stuff.
RS: There have been some heady comparisons made between this book and The Stand. Is that just lazy journalism, or maybe a result of this book’s epic length?
JC: I think when people compare books to other books it’s just a form of shorthand. It’s a way of saying ‘This has similar content.’ But once you start doing that you open the floodgates. No book is invented whole cloth, because no plot is invented whole cloth. It’s just saying ‘This book gave me a similar experience to that other book,’ and in that sense it’s just a way of starting a conversation, even though it’s not a good way of summing up the whole thing. So, yeah, I have heard that a lot. I’ve heard ‘It’s The Stand meets The Road meets The Andromeda Strain meets Moby Dick,’ you know? The range of books that influenced this one is very large. I thought about the great adventure novels that I read as a kid, like Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, which was an important book for me because it’s such a sprawling epic with great characters. It both uses genre and also completely leaps over it. Any book about a great journey will make reference to The Odyssey, you know? And there are references to The Odyssey in here, there are references to three plays by Shakespeare that were important ones to me – it’s a huge range. It’s a kind of garden of references to other books, but I do think you can read and experience The Passage all by itself without having read any other book in the world, although I don’t know who that person would be. There are some writers who will do the pretending of ‘Oh, my book stands alone and there’s nothing else like it,’ but I’ve been a college professor way too long to buy that. I would prefer to just throw my arms around the idea that all books are in conversations with other books, and have fun with that idea. There are lots of little winks and Easter eggs in the graphs.
RS: Is one of those winks the references to “paleovirology” as a science? I didn’t Google it, but I couldn’t tell if that’s something real or if you’re just stringing words together.
JC: I think I just made that one up! It is a big book and I can’t remember exactly how everything worked itself out, but I had a friend who wrote a book about the science of prehistoric pollen, and she had a character who was a scientist that was looking for the first flower. It’s a great novel, Easter Island by Jennifer Vanderbes, and she and I are good friends. She’s actually a better scientist than I am, but we both love science and think it’s interesting and that there’s great material to be had there. If there is no such thing as paleovirology, I’ll gladly take credit for its invention.
RS: I heard that you submitted this manuscript under a gender-neutral penname, and then didn’t use it?
JC: Yes, and you wouldn’t even have known it was gender-neutral – that was the best thing about the trick. It wasn’t like F. Flintstone, where there’s just an initial there because the writer obviously doesn’t want you to know the gender. I chose the first name Jordan, so that if you look at it and you want it to be a woman it will be a woman and if you want it to be a man it’s a man. So, yeah, it was submitted under the very brief penname Jordan Ainsley. It was never meant to survive. I wasn’t writing it under that name, I was only submitting it under that name. The publishing world wants to put books – and the writers of those books – into categories and they want to do it very quickly. It has a lot to do with the way books are sold, but it has very little to do with the way books are written, or at least the way I write books. I’m defiantly uninterested in being categorized as a writer. I never want to write the same book twice, even though I am going to write three books in the world of The Passage – there are three volumes. Everyone says it’s a trilogy, but it’s really not – they are meant to be free-standing books that accumulate, also. But in general I don’t see myself as a certain kind of writer, I just see myself as a writer. I had written two quote-unquote literary books, they were critically appreciated, they had pretty quiet plots, the emphasis was more on the quality of the writing, and I was very proud of them and think they’re wonderful books. I could die happy because I wrote them. But I did not want this manuscript to go out and hit an editor’s desk and then they call up my other books and immediately expect it to be a certain kind of thing. If that happened they would spend their whole time reading going ‘My God, how different this is, how different this is!’ I wanted them to just read the book and experience the book without any kind of preconceptions and without the context of my other books. So, I was never going to keep the name, I just wanted to use it as a way of getting the best kind of read I could.
RS: Having made a deal for three books and committed to an outline, what if you decide six months from now that the next books should go off in a different direction? Would that be problematic, in terms of your book deal?
JC: I think I have pretty free reign. They know the gist of books two and three. And that’s about it, what they know. They have faith in me to continue the story in a satisfying way. My experience as a writer is that every editor I’ve ever worked with keeps saying one thing, even when they were making large suggestions and even when they were offering you elaborate criticisms: they always said “It’s your book.” And they’re right. You can’t tell somebody else what to write. You can’t do it because it doesn’t work, it would be a terrible disruption of the natural chemistry. Psychologically, morally, ethically – pick a category – all of these elements actually combine to make a story out of words. I’ve never had an editor who didn’t stand back and let that happen, but that said I’ve always loved being edited. You have to learn to be a cooperative and attentive listener to editors. But, yeah, if I suddenly decided that these are no longer books about a world with vampires -- it’s about little green men from Mars now -- that would upset them. But I’m not gonna do that. A lot of this is based on mutual trust and respect, just like anything else.
RS: What’s been the reaction of your colleagues in academia to this book?
JC: I’ve got to say that overall the university has been enormously supportive and helpful to me. They’ve basically let me not teach for a few years, but not quit either. Some of that is because I’m a tenured guy. I’ve been there for a while, and I’ve been teaching college for twenty years, and I’m perceived as valuable to the institution. Teaching is my other life and I put a lot of pride into it. I’m good at it. I have former students sprinkled all over planet Earth who show up at my book readings and I’m always very delighted to see them. As for my colleagues, I sort of vanished two and a half years ago when all of this started. Those that I see and hang out with, they’re just really excited. They think it’s great, but the other thing is that Rice is full of rock stars. They have Nobel laureates on the faculty. Everybody there is incredibly good at what they do, though theirs might be somewhat more obscure and mine happens to be kind of public and visible – that’s really the only difference. They have the world’s preeminent Victorianists, you know? So, I’ve always felt really lucky to be there and almost like a sort of imposter because they’re all so smart. In a way, I finally feel like I have my Rice street cred.
RS: The book could garner some interesting academic criticism, with regards to its heightened race consciousness. In the prologue there’s a pronounced black and white divide, a lot of Southern racial rigidity and animosity that feels a bit retro even now; then the catastrophe happens and all of that is completely gone. In the A.V. era, your hero is a young black man and the heroine, his love interest, is a white redhead girl.
JC: It’s the one piece of good news in the whole book. I live in large American cities, I always have. I lived in Philadelphia for eleven years and I live in Houston now, and race is the big subject. It’s the big subject even when we’re not talking about it. And when we talk about it openly, it’s just so explosive and dangerous. So we run away and shut it down, or we pretend like we’re talking about something else. Now, I didn’t do this overtly for some political reason, but I was writing a book about the end of the world. I didn’t want to pretend like that was only happening to a certain kind of person. It happens to everybody, and that means black and white and brown and rich and poor, and that’s all North America. For dramatic purposes the question remains: what happened to the rest of the world? I’m not looking at what happened in Japan or Indonesia, but within the United States I wanted it to be a full-bodied presentation. There’s a line in the book, in the section called The Last City where Ida Jaxon is looking back and narrating the Philadelphia Evacuation and she describes a man as “A big white man with a beard.” And she says something about how you’re not black or white or young or old when you know you’re about to die.
RS: And then she says that it’s funny, looking back all these years later, how there used to be white people.
JC: Yeah. It’s this small community of people and race essentially vanishes because of white people having children with black people and Asian people. It takes just a few generations, then the idea leaves – it’s just gone. There are still certain physical markers, like for instance the references made to “Jaxon hair.” The Jaxon family is African-American and so there’s a strain of darker, denser hair. But they don’t think of it as “black hair,” they just think of it as hair belonging to a particular family. So, the good thing about the world that these people live in – the only good thing, probably – is that that has just ended. I’m glad you noticed that, actually. I haven’t had a chance to talk about it at all. This was the present that I gave to these people, for all of their troubles and sorrows. I wanted there to be one upside. And there are other upsides, actually, just in the way they live. They’re very close, they know each other, they’re very familiar to each other. There are no anonymous people, as most of us kind of are moving through this world. They are a tribe. And this was definitely the thing I wanted to give to that world, and I hope people do notice it, because there is a message there.
RS: Should we expect any more upsides in the coming books? Based on the last page of The Passage, it seems like it’s all downhill from here.
JC: It isn’t, because they know what to do. They just don’t know how to do it yet. The upside will be the upside of heroism, in all its forms. What awaits these people is an opportunity which I personally wouldn’t want myself, but it has been thrust upon them by me, their creator: a chance to rise to the biggest occasion of all. To become myth. To become the basis of a creation story.
RS: When you said earlier that the next books would be free-standing, does that mean you might not necessarily even continue following the established characters?
JC: No, no, I’ll continue with these characters. When I say free-standing, I mean that each book will kind of have a fresh beginning, with some new material injected into the story, and a satisfying conclusion. You won’t send the book pinwheeling across the room in frustration that it didn’t actually end. It’s okay to toss a little cliffhanger in there, a little bit of bait for the next book. That’s pleasurable for a reader, and I’ve watched too many exciting television series. I think we’ve gotten used to these long, novel-like television series. With The Sopranos, all of a sudden television got good, you know? It became like when everybody would wait on the dock for the new Dickens, the new installment. We’ve had a number of really well-written, successful TV shows in the last decade, I suppose, that have re-excited people about the potential of a sustained, episodic narrative, which is what this is. People become addicted to shows now, and I’m very observant of that. I think it’s interesting, and I think it’s good for us. The television I watched as a kid was just crap, really. But now real writers are working in television and producing what are essentially long, episodic novels. I suppose that’s part of my education as a writer.
RS: Does that mean you’d be satisfied if The Passage ended up as miniseries of some kind instead of going down the route of a Ridley Scott film?
JC: It’s definitely going to the movies; that’s how they’re going to do it. That’s an all-together different artifact. And they’re the experts. I stand aside with gratitude at the fact that I have John Logan and Ridley Scott.
RS: Do you expect to be working closely with John Logan on the script? What’s the arrangement?
JC: The arrangement is that he’s the screenwriter and I will consult on matters of necessity, which there are going to be plenty of. I imagine that because this is a three book tale, there’s hope that it’s also going to be a three movie tale, and so they need to know things about volumes two and three in order to appropriately adapt the material. I’ve been in conversation with John especially, but also with the producers and so on about this. It helps them to shape the characters and think about the stuff that movie people think about, like casting. They need to know how old these people are going to get. I can sit down and do anything I want with the stroke of a pen, but they have to call caterers, you know? They have to build towns and get everyone together in the same place, and it’s very complicated. I just make coffee and go to the office. So, yeah, there are logistics that I’ve given no thought to whatsoever that I actually do have something to say about.
RS: Have you seen the movie in your head? Or do you not really think like that.
JC: Well, I grew up watching movies. I was as influenced by movies as I was by books. I grew up in the woods, basically. I didn’t have any other kids around. I grew up in Westchester County, which is now a fancy-schmancy suburb, but back then people couldn’t even commute to New York because they hadn’t electrified the train lines yet. When I went home at the end of the day, or on the weekend, all I had to do was basically wander around the woods. In those days movies were special, because you actually went to a movie theater to see them, and they had one screen. [laughs] I’m making myself sound like Ol’ Grandpa, but it was actually different. The 70s were just different. I remember my mom dropping me off at a Planet of the Apesfilm festival at the local playhouse, and I’d packed a lunch. I sat through all five of those movies, which I loved. The Planet of the Apesfranchise is one that I totally loved as a kid. I had the Planet of the Apescomic books and I even watched the cheesy TV show. But to go back to your question, did I see it as a movie in my head? I think I see everything in my head as a movie a little bit, even this conversation. But I’m also aware that I work in words. What I have is narration, and what Ridley Scott and John Logan have is visual spectacle. They do their exposition with a sweep of the camera and the right details, I do it with sentences. So, it’s in the back of my head; I always try to visually imagine a scene. I’m very loyal to the physical reality of it and I do think really hard about who is standing where and what that means, and what kind of gestures they could make and how far they are away from each other. If a guy is climbing a ladder and he’s carrying something, how’s he gonna do that? I am really careful about things like that, and it requires that I just close my eyes and imagine it so I can get the physics of it right. And not just the physical physics, but the emotional physics: how does it feel to be in that room with those people? And that’s all those years I spent watching movies at the playhouse very attentively, because you couldn’t take a movie for granted then – that was the movie that was going to be at the theater for two months. It was time well spent!
RS: You know, Stanley Kubrick used to annoy Stephen King by calling him at 3:00am during the making of The Shining to ask if he believed in God, things like that. Are you prepared for the eccentricities of movie folk?
JC: [laughs] You know, this whole thing has been moving from one space that I know really well – my head, cause I just sit in a chair and write a book and maybe go in and make a ham sandwich once in a while – to something else, and it really is a trip. If Sir Ridley, who is this great big bear of a man, wants to call me up and ask me questions in his heavy Welsh accent, then far out! You know why? Cause he’s a genius. When a genius calls me on the phone, I take the call.
RS: I think Alicia is my favorite character in the book. Who should be cast?
JC: People ask me about casting a lot, but they don’t ask me specifically about Alicia -- I’m glad you did, because I totally love her. She’s my dream date in a lot of ways. She’s an amalgamation of all these great, strong women. And I really did want to write a book where the female characters were every bit as important and heroic as the male characters and in many cases more so. The men in this book are often baggage handlers to the women! As for Alicia, the funny thing about writing a book is that you do imagine them in your head and they are very vivid and very specific in your mind, but they aren’t really built out of actors. They’re either built out of your imagination or other people that you know. So, it’s challenging to actually say who would play that character and I kind of avoid it, psychologically, so that I can maintain my working relationship with this person. So now I will turn it around and ask you: who would you like to play Alicia?
RS: Scarlett Johansson.
JC: Scarlett Johansson, with red hair! I actually just saw her in what was kind of her first action role, Iron Man 2, and I think she’s got red hair in that too, doesn’t she? Yeah, let’s get it going, let’s make it happen.
RS: I’ll call Sir Ridley.


The Passage is available now in bookstores everywhere.

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Justin+Cronin%3A+The+Passage/