reagan

Its close to the year 2020. Americas 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 thats 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 thats 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 Cronins new 800-page epic, The Passage. Time is what the title refers to the books 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 wasnt 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 Houstons 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. Its named for his father, though. And also the governor thing, and what I said to him about that was Yes, I get that its far-fetched, but anyone who thinks its impossible doesnt know anything about the dynastic nature of Texas politics. But yeah, some people have said its 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: Im a parent, and as a parent youve got to stay optimistic. But the book is an expression of anxieties of various kinds. Theyre the anxieties Ive had since I was a kid, and I think theyre 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 dont 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 didnt 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 theres been a danger out there, but we just dont know what form it will take. Were 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 dont write a book like this because you think thats what the future is going to be like. In a sense, its not forecasting. Its 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 youre 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 Weismans 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 Im 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 didnt read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which came out when I was beginning this novel, because hes 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 its 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. Youd still have mummified corpses because theyd 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 books epic length?
JC: I think when people compare books to other books its just a form of shorthand. Its 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. Its just saying This book gave me a similar experience to that other book, and in that sense its just a way of starting a conversation, even though its not a good way of summing up the whole thing. So, yeah, I have heard that a lot. Ive heard Its 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 McMurtrys Lonesome Dove, which was an important book for me because its 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 its a huge range. Its 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 dont know who that person would be. There are some writers who will do the pretending of Oh, my book stands alone and theres nothing else like it, but Ive 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 didnt Google it, but I couldnt tell if thats something real or if youre just stringing words together.
JC: I think I just made that one up! It is a big book and I cant 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. Its a great novel, Easter Island by Jennifer Vanderbes, and she and I are good friends. Shes actually a better scientist than I am, but we both love science and think its interesting and that theres great material to be had there. If there is no such thing as paleovirology, Ill gladly take credit for its invention.
RS: I heard that you submitted this manuscript under a gender-neutral penname, and then didnt use it?
JC: Yes, and you wouldnt even have known it was gender-neutral that was the best thing about the trick. It wasnt like F. Flintstone, where theres just an initial there because the writer obviously doesnt 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 its a man. So, yeah, it was submitted under the very brief penname Jordan Ainsley. It was never meant to survive. I wasnt 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. Im 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 its a trilogy, but its really not they are meant to be free-standing books that accumulate, also. But in general I dont 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 theyre wonderful books. I could die happy because I wrote them. But I did not want this manuscript to go out and hit an editors 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 thats 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 Ive 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 Its your book. And theyre right. You cant tell somebody else what to write. You cant do it because it doesnt 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. Ive never had an editor who didnt stand back and let that happen, but that said Ive 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 -- its about little green men from Mars now -- that would upset them. But Im not gonna do that. A lot of this is based on mutual trust and respect, just like anything else.
RS: Whats been the reaction of your colleagues in academia to this book?
JC: Ive got to say that overall the university has been enormously supportive and helpful to me. Theyve basically let me not teach for a few years, but not quit either. Some of that is because Im a tenured guy. Ive been there for a while, and Ive been teaching college for twenty years, and Im perceived as valuable to the institution. Teaching is my other life and I put a lot of pride into it. Im good at it. I have former students sprinkled all over planet Earth who show up at my book readings and Im 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, theyre just really excited. They think its 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 thats really the only difference. They have the worlds preeminent Victorianists, you know? So, Ive always felt really lucky to be there and almost like a sort of imposter because theyre 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 theres 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: Its 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. Its the big subject even when were not talking about it. And when we talk about it openly, its just so explosive and dangerous. So we run away and shut it down, or we pretend like were talking about something else. Now, I didnt do this overtly for some political reason, but I was writing a book about the end of the world. I didnt 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 thats all North America. For dramatic purposes the question remains: what happened to the rest of the world? Im not looking at what happened in Japan or Indonesia, but within the United States I wanted it to be a full-bodied presentation. Theres 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 youre not black or white or young or old when you know youre about to die.
RS: And then she says that its funny, looking back all these years later, how there used to be white people.
JC: Yeah. Its 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 its 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 theres a strain of darker, denser hair. But they dont 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. Im glad you noticed that, actually. I havent 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. Theyre very close, they know each other, theyre 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 its all downhill from here.
JC: It isnt, because they know what to do. They just dont 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 wouldnt 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, Ill 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 wont send the book pinwheeling across the room in frustration that it didnt actually end. Its okay to toss a little cliffhanger in there, a little bit of bait for the next book. Thats pleasurable for a reader, and Ive watched too many exciting television series. I think weve 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. Weve 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 Im very observant of that. I think its interesting, and I think its 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 thats part of my education as a writer.
RS: Does that mean youd be satisfied if The Passage ended up as miniseries of some kind instead of going down the route of a Ridley Scott film?
JC: Its definitely going to the movies; thats how theyre going to do it. Thats an all-together different artifact. And theyre 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? Whats the arrangement?
JC: The arrangement is that hes 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, theres hope that its 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. Ive 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 its very complicated. I just make coffee and go to the office. So, yeah, there are logistics that Ive 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 didnt have any other kids around. I grew up in Westchester County, which is now a fancy-schmancy suburb, but back then people couldnt even commute to New York because they hadnt 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] Im 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 Id 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 Im 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, its in the back of my head; I always try to visually imagine a scene. Im 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 hes carrying something, hows 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 thats all those years I spent watching movies at the playhouse very attentively, because you couldnt 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 hes 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 dont ask me specifically about Alicia -- Im glad you did, because I totally love her. Shes my dream date in a lot of ways. Shes 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 arent really built out of actors. Theyre either built out of your imagination or other people that you know. So, its 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 shes got red hair in that too, doesnt she? Yeah, lets get it going, lets make it happen.
RS: Ill call Sir Ridley.


The Passage is available now in bookstores everywhere.