Laura Kasischke’s Portrait of an American Illusion

Relatively unknown in the United States, yet a literary star across Europe – particularly in France, where readers eagerly await each new novel – Laura Kasischke embodies the familiar French saying “nul n’est prophète en son pays”: no one is a prophet in their own country.

The hallmark of the American novelist, who is also a professor of English language and literature at the University of Michigan, is her ability to infuse seemingly ordinary situations with unease and unsettling strangeness. This is what gives her poetry, collected in a Gallimard anthology in 2022, its singular charm, and what lends such power to her fiction, from White Bird in a Blizzard (1997) to The Raising (2011) and Mind of Winter, her last novel, published in 2014.

That was 12 years ago. Since then, Kasischke has been writing – and above all rewriting – the same novel. Twelve years of painstaking craftsmanship, refining every sentence down to the comma, before finally feeling satisfied with the story she had written. To say that The Lifeguard was hard-won would be an understatement. Kasischke could talk about the endurance it took for hours.

The Lifeguard centers on the events of July 16, 1969, as the entire world looks skyward, hoping to witness the launch of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. In the small town of Mission Hills, Michigan, tragedy strikes: five-year-old Richie Manning drowns at the local swimming club. Through multiple perspectives and shifts in time, Kasischke examines the reverberations of the drowning within a community where appearances are deceptive. In doing so, she exposes the contradictions of a country capable of sending men to the moon yet incapable of protecting its own children.

It’s been 12 years since your last novel, although you’ve continued to write poetry in that time. Why the long gap?

LK Well, life. I was working on many things at the same time. Maybe I was everywhere and nowhere. And when you do that, time flies. But to be honest, there was mainly the struggle. I had the idea of this novel – at least, the story I wanted to tell – for a long time, but I was missing a good way of telling it. For years, it was a single point-of-view story. I wrote around 500 pages and finally realized it just didn’t work. The reason was simple: no single character could possibly know the whole story. So, I started to write about the drowning of Richie Manning through multiple perspectives, using different types of narrative and different voices. Then, I had to build a back story for every character. But that wasn’t the hardest part. What quickly became tricky was to assemble all these short stories, these little poems, to build a single novel. I had so many balls up in the air that I was trying to juggle – I had to put the text away for long periods because I couldn’t read it anymore. So many times, I thought I was going to give up. I have dozens of drafts hidden in my desk that I couldn’t finish, and The Lifeguard was very close to joining them. But I could not let Richie drown without telling his story.

Is endurance the most important quality for a writer?

LK I think so. But not exactly in a marathon runner kind of way – rather, in a psychological way. You need to tell yourself every day that the novel you’re writing – and spending most of your time on – deserves it. God, it is harsh. I wish I were the kind of writer who doesn’t give up, but I’m so impatient, and it always feels like, “Why not just start over if this is so much trouble?” I make most of my living from teaching, so writing should be a space of fulfillment. The reader’s job is so much easier: only pleasure, no pain, no struggle. At the same time, I can’t stand the idea of never writing again. I would rather spend the rest of my life working feverishly on something that never gets published than to spend my life only thinking about writing. With time, I found that one of the keys is to keep the childish joy of writing burning. For example, I really enjoy writing my day-to-day life in a journal – it reminds me of the diary I had when I was a teenager. And it helps me fight the very infertile times. Happily, even in a writer’s life, getting older means getting wiser and getting better.

I imagine it’s a special moment for a writer to see a book you’ve been working on for so long finally become available for readers. 

LK It’s like throwing a penny in a bottomless well and waiting to hear it splash. It just doesn’t get old. It’s an ego trip. You always hope that this book is special, that you write it for a higher spiritual purpose, with a specific artistic vision, but when it’s published, all of that brutally vanishes. So, I would say, relief first, then accomplishment – but finally, a sort of emptiness. 

Is that because the story doesn’t belong to you alone anymore?

LK No, I don’t think like that. I don’t want to sound pretentiously spiritual about it, but I’m figuring out the sense of what I’m writing when I’m writing it. So, of course, when I give the manuscript to the publisher, I feel like, “OK, it’s not in my hands anymore.” But even before that, it feels that way. I usually feel more control in my novels than in my poetry. But here, it all collapsed. When I started writing these short sections and trying to put them next to each other, it became like writing a poem, and I have to say it’s harder and scarier, and you never know where you’re going to land. So, the question is: was it ever once in my hands?

The Lifeguard is one of the main events of France’s “rentrée littéraire” – the annual autumn publishing season – whereas you struggled to publish it in the United States. It reminds me of  writers such as David Vann or James Ellroy. How do you deal with the difference in the way your work has been received in France and in your home country?

LK It’s quite strange, but I deal with it very easily. In the U.S., I’m better known for my poetry, and my fiction has largely gone unnoticed. In France, each new novel garners so many laudatory reviews. I feel lucky and thrilled to be recognized there. I couldn’t have chosen a better country, with so many great authors and great readers. All the best literary experiments have been done in France. And being published by Gallimard, an historic publisher, for this new novel, feels like a dream come true.

Tell me about the genesis of The Lifeguard. What was your first idea?

LK Tricky question, especially when I spent years and years writing the same novel. But I remember it all began with Becca, the redhead girl. She is the traumatized witness to Richie Manning’s drowning, and the tragedy will awaken other wounds within her. It was from her point of view that I wrote the first draft, which failed. I quickly understood that what interested me the most was the consequences of Richie’s death within the little community. I wanted Mission Hills, Michigan, to embody those small American towns where everything seems perfect on the surface – a close-knit community far removed from the world’s troubles, until the facade begins to crack. And the drowning serves as the trigger. Sadness, anger, gossip, the hunt for a scapegoat, the struggle when you’re the scapegoat, the pain of friends and families.

The Lifeguard is deeply rooted in a particular time in American history, with Apollo 11 and the first moon landing. You were eight years old in 1969 – do you remember this moment?

LK Absolutely not. It’s funny – to write the book, I met many people who were children at the time, and the only thing they remember is grown-ups telling them they’d remember that moment for the rest of their life. But they didn’t. It’s like Richie in the novel: his father is so excited by this moment of history, and he’s so disappointed that his son doesn’t really care. To set up the drama during this historical moment is a way for me to talk about the illusions of power, the illusions of capitalism that always ruled America. While everyone is looking to the sky, following the American dream, Richie is drowning, and lives are destroyed.

A word about the novel’s structure: what does the polyphonic form bring to the story?

LK Every truth needs a multiple-perspective story. That’s why we live this tragedy through the lens of Richie’s family but also of the lifeguard accused of neglect; of the redhead girl, the witness; and even with an omniscient third person. And for each of these voices, I tried to build a different language, a different tone and style. I also gave myself the freedom to shift back and forth in time, to build mystery and suspense. In a way, I also wanted the book to look like a psychological thriller.

Your novels are often built around the idea of unease. Do you like the idea of making your readers feel unsettled?

LK I guess so. Starting the novel with the drowning was risky. It kills the suspense, but it reinforces the strangeness of the situation. The nonlinear narrative, too – the reader is trapped in a loop, feeling stuck. And, above all, I love to work with troubled memories. It’s a goldmine for a novelist, and I’m very sensitive to it.