Andrew Krivak Writes One Good Sentence, Again and Again

The novelist joins the program to discuss the release of his new novel “Mule Boy,” life in New Hampshire, and what it takes to tell stories for a living.

Photo: Sharona Jacobs

When I connect with novelist Andrew Krivak via Zoom, he’s just returned from a morning of cross country skiing in New Hampshire. Though he and his family live in Boston, Krivak spends as much time as he can a little further north, where he skis in the winter and swims in the summer and writes year round. It’s a nice sounding life, and one that makes sense once you read his novels. His debut, The Sojourn, was a National Book Award finalist, and his 2020 book The Bear was a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read selection. They’re philosophically weighty and untethered from traditional form, a sterling approximation of some of the influences he cites throughout our interview: Faulkner, Jon Fosse, The Torah.

After I finished up an advance copy of his just-released fifth novel, Mule Boy, I immediately put in a request to speak with Krivak. It unfolds over the course of a single sentence, weaving between generations like a hallucinogenic reckoning of a tragedy scrambled into oblivion and pieced back together by memory. It’s Absalom, Absalom! shrunk in half and moved to coal country. I can’t think of much higher praise.

Krivak is a delightful man, the sort of person I fear will stop existing within a few generations. He’s infectiously curious, extremely smart, and very charismatic. He has enough book recommendations to last a lifetime, and speaking with him made me want to be a stronger writer and thinker. That’s all I ever really want out of these Hobbyist interviews. I hope you come away from this conversation feeling the same way. Buy Mule Boy here, and buy each of Andrew Krivak’s previous four novels here, here, here, and here.

Is New Hampshire home full time for you?
New Hampshire remains a second home for us that we bought 11, 12 years ago. I don’t spend as much time there as I want to, but kids are in school in Boston. Work is here. It’s a year round place, and I really wish that one day I could just live there full time.

And you do a lot of cross country skiing, yeah? It’s one of my favorite activities.
I was on my classical skis today. I love to skate ski, but because the conditions on the lake were so good, I just started to skate on my classicals. Quite literally hauling ass. No wind, either. It could not have been a nicer morning for me.

How far is your place from Boston?
It’s 90 minutes door to door. From the backside, I walked down to Thorndike Pond, which is a lakeside pond on the eastern side of Mount Monadnock, and then from the dining room, there’s a view of Mount Monadnock, which was a favorite of the Transcendentalists. Thoreau used to go up there and hang out and make pine lean-tos, and just be on the mountain. He’d complain if it was raining and do his Thoreau thing if it wasn’t. Melville loved it. The painter Abbott Thayer lived in Dublin, the next town over. He painted it in many different seasons, many different profiles. It’s beautiful.

Do you have a day job outside of writing novels?
I’ve recently gone back to teaching. I’m a visiting lecturer at Harvard in the creative writing program. They called me up and asked me and I said, sure. It’s kind of nice when Harvard calls you. Generally say yes. I also have a gig that came about as a result of The Bear, which was released two novels ago. It’s sort of a long story.

We’ve got nothing but time.
The Bear was a four-time National Endowment for the Arts Big Read title. New Hampshire Humanities got a grant to have, essentially, most of the state read the book. A woman who works at New Hampshire Humanities told me that there were some incarcerated fathers at the Concord facility who were reading The Bear and they wondered if I would come and talk to them. They’re part of the Family Connections Center. It’s essentially for incarcerated men and women who have children. They read books at any level, from children’s books to middle grade, to novels if they’re teenage kids. The kids come in and they talk about the books with the parents. It’s amazing. The recidivism rate for an inmate who’s given a book to read with his children is single digits.

I went up and talked about The Bear and we had such a great time. They said, let’s do another one. We did my first novel, The Sojourn, and then I was asked to keep doing it. Now I’m a discussions facilitator for the New Hampshire Department of Corrections Family Connections Center. I go into the prisons and read books with inmates who want to read them with their children.

That’s incredible. That gave me chills just hearing about it.
It’s something I wait for. I’ve done overnight trips, leaving in the morning from Boston. I’ll do an afternoon session, then I stay overnight in a hotel and then I go back to the same thing for another session with the men in the morning. Then when I get home, I just sit around and put on some vinyl on and think.

I imagine it’s both very satisfying and very draining at the same time
It is, yeah. My real job for over 10 years now has been raising our three kids. I was doing the adjunct thing and around my second novel, I was teaching at Boston College in the honors program—so a lot of philosophy and literature. I really loved it because I had a philosophy background, but it was taking a lot of time away from my writing and adjunct pay is not very good. My wife is a management consultant. She travels a lot and we had nannies and never did the au pair thing, but babysitters to help whenever we had to get the kids somewhere. I have three children, who are now 19, 17, and 15.

My wife and I sat down and we just flipped the script. She said that if I no longer teach, I should just watch the kids and write. She could jump on a plane and go wherever she needed to without worrying. We did that for nearly 10 years. It’s really been incredible. My kids are now in college and high school. They’re not exactly done with me. They always need me for something. So, the call from Harvard was serendipitous. Now I have more time and it’s just a class. It’s just a visiting lectureship and it gets me back in the classroom. And I’m a different person. I’m a different writer. I’m a different thinker. It’s been rewarding.

I was unaware of your philosophical focus in school, but having read your novels it does make a lot of sense. What was your focus?
I was an undergraduate at St. John’s College in Annapolis, in the Great Books program. We got from Homer to Hegel. My sophomore year was my favorite. Junior year starts with Milton. Sophomore year, it’s all Dante, it’s Chaucher, it’s Plotinus, it’s St. Thomas Aquinas, it’s Augustine. It’s Medieval philosophy. I don’t really think of myself as any sort of Medievalist, but I just love the interplay of poetry and philosophy that came out of that Medieval world. There was a kind of wonder in it. I remember this conversation we had in a seminar about Dante. Of course “The Inferno” is made up. Dante didn’t go through hell, but you could think about a way in which Dante actually experienced this journey through hell with Virgil as his guide. That was fascinating.

It really blew the doors open for me. More contemporarily, once we got to spring semester of senior year, we were reading Faulkner, Joyce, and Conrad. That was really where I thought, this literature thing is pretty cool. I want to do this.

How long ago did the idea for Mule Boy begin to form?
My first novel, The Sojourn, was essentially me channeling my Slovak grandmother. My younger brother and I used to sit and just listen to her tell stories about the old country. She, and my grandfather who died before I was born, grew up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My grandfather, my mother’s father, fought with the Austrian Landwehr as a conscripted Slovak national on the Piave River against the Italians and the English. My grandmother hated this world. She was born in Pueblo, Colorado, but her mother was killed on a train trestle when this young cousin or young nephew she was walking with got his foot stuck as they were trying to avoid this train over the Arkansas River.

Her father—after whom I’m named, my great-grandfather—took his three daughters and infant son back to the old country and was given a new wife by the priest, and it was my grandmother’s stepmother. She hated it. There’s this idea of a young man born in America who goes back to the old country, and that old country is his sojourn. That period of rest between two journeys just fascinated me. During World War I, my mother’s father fought on the Axis side. My father’s father fought in it on the Allied side. He was in the ninth field artillery in France. Everything and everyone in that first novel I wrote is an amalgam of the story she told me.

That’s the germ of me as a writer, essentially. Now, with Mule Boy, I know that my father’s father died in the coal mines. He died in a mine cave-in when my father was three. I always wondered about that moment, that memento mori—what is it like for a man who’s trapped in the mines to die underground? My grandmother never really spoke about it much. My father didn’t know anything about it, but my aunt, who’s still alive—she’s 95—was in my grandmother’s belly. My grandmother was five months pregnant with her when her husband, my grandfather, died. I think my aunt, for her whole life, has tried to find out who her father was. There were elements of my going back and talking to my Aunt Genevieve about this. I’ve always thought about a short novel that would involve the mines. That’s the germ of it. Then it was just a function of finding the form and who the character would be. That was another narrative journey, if you will.

The form is staggering. When did you come upon that idea? It gives the novel such propulsion and a low level anxiety that comes from a lack of resolution until the novel is over.
I’m a modernist by training. I have a PhD in literary modernism, so the whole stream of conscious Faulkner, of course, Joyce. But I had also been reading a lot of Jon Fosse, the Norwegian author. I was also influenced by Robert Alter. In his recent translation of Hebrew scripture, there’s an entire introduction to the Pentateuch and he talks a lot about the paratactic structure of Hebrew. Syntactic is subject, verb, object, period, and you move along in sentences. Paratactic just means that the sentence moves in clauses. You can still write paratactically and have a period and write a sentence, but essentially it’s an oral tradition and it’s the way in which Hebrew scripture is written. Alter bemoans the fact that so much of contemporary translations lose the paratactic poetry and speed of Hebrew scripture.

He gives an example of the story of Rachel at the well. There are 25 ‘ands’ in a single paragraph…“And Rachel came to the well and she saw the men, and the men said, ‘Where’s your father?,’ And Rachel said, ‘My father’s not here.’ And the men said, ‘Go to him and tell him that we are at the well and we want water and food.’ And so Rachel went to her father and she said to her father, ‘Father, there are men at the well.’ And her father said, ‘Go to them, feed them, give them water.’ And Rachel did.” There’s a kind of speed to that because all of a sudden there’s this event. These men are not just ordinary men. In that same paragraph, the King James version has only five ‘ands.’

I was really moved by this entire translation. He has three volumes of Hebrew scripture. It may be the only fortunate thing I experienced out of COVID was sitting down and reading all of that. Long story bearable for a short novel, when I started to write, the idea of the beginning being in the third person I got from Michael Ondaatje novel, The Cat’s Table. I love that novel. I love Ondaatje. He’s my favorite living writer—since Cormac McCarthy died. I began that in the third person and I just wrote down that opening scene of the boy going to the breaker. I didn’t know yet that he would be the mule boy. I thought maybe he would be one of the butties, but I just knew it was going to be a young boy. I just jumped to the first person and I kept writing in this paratactic structure and essentially wrote the entire book that way. Midway through, I went back and tried to put it into standard syntactic sentence form and it was boring as hell.

I thought, let’s just finish the whole thing and see what shakes out. I even put a period at the end when I got there and then I erased it because it’s not about the periods. There’s no period in the book because it’s not about the sentences. I sent it to my editor. I said, I’m afraid this is going to be unreadable. A couple days later she wrote back, oh, it’s not unreadable at all. This is fascinating. I told her that I had tried to write it in good literary standard prose, but it just didn’t have the same power, the same force. Anxiety is an interesting word to use. He’s certainly a man who struggles with guilt, trauma, and anxiety throughout his whole life. Then there’s the idea too that he would be speaking from the age of roughly 80 or so. He’s just an old man and he’s done. Now, it’s just a reflection on the day. That form just comes from Aristotle. The tragedy should take place in the course of 24 hours. I thought, let’s give Ondro Prach his 24 hours and see what comes of it. So, the memory goes back, keeps going back and coming into the future, goes back and then comes into the present, goes back and comes into the present. Then the people who come to him over time, only in the final pages do you get the person who would and should come to him in the present moment. That was a little tricky, making sure that I got the logic right, but I hope I did.

How do you make sure that that logic does stay tidy and organized? Are you an outliner?
Yeah, I do outline when I need to. I will also just write to get it out when I need to. I’ll say that I do what the story needs done at the time. I talked to my students about this. Narratives need logic, otherwise they’re incomprehensible, but you can still be innovative and you can still be experimental and maintain a narrative logic.

I feel like you can do away with the logic as long as you know what it is. It’s when you ignore logic and don’t really establish one in the first place that you run into trouble. Do you have a daily writing process? Are you someone that sits down every day and has to write?
I do. I write every day. I touch it every day. I have to. I guess in my old age now, I’m less scrupulous about what that means—sitting down and writing. I read a lot and I take a lot of notes. Any novelist will tell you that you just get a novelist’s eye. So I read as a writer. I look as a writer. My wife will say, be careful talking to him because you’re going to end up in a novel. But seriously, it’s about seeing what you might need when you actually do sit down at the page. I’ve learned from raising three children that every day is going to have its own demands on your time. I map out what I will do the next day. It could be to get up at 5:00 and write until 7:00, or it could be to get up at 7:00 and write until 10:00 or noon.

Ten years ago, a five-year-old would wake up vomiting and you’ve got to go to the doctor the next day or stay up all night, and there’s no writing that day, but that’s okay. Before I’d get back to sleep myself, I’d read a page of my favorite writer and think, yeah, I’m going to get back to it eventually. I never do the math. If you do the math, you go nuts. Eventually the pages add up if you just get back to the page whenever you need to. Now that my children are much older, I have larger blocks of time.

How often do you get up to New Hampshire?
At this point, it’s every other week. There’s not always snow, though. It’s got to be good. Sometimes I’ll just say, look, I got to bug out. I need to go skiing or I just want to burn some firewood and read.

What else do you like doing that’s completely removed from the literary world?
In the summer, I’m an open water swimmer. In college, I was a Myrtle Beach ocean lifeguard. I just kept swimming. I was never a swimmer in high school. I didn’t go to a school that had a pool. I met a buddy of mine at college whose brother was lifeguarding in Myrtle Beach. He was like, just get your lifesaving certificate and come down to the beach. It’ll change your life, blow your mind. I did, and he was right. I’m a sailor too, but the lake is too fluky and I don’t have a sailboat anymore. I did work in a boatyard as a yacht rigger between undergrad and grad school. I just love being around boats and being on the water. But for now, there’s nothing I like better than just getting into that lake and swimming for miles. I’ll swim to exhaustion. I’ve got a half mile loop, I’ve got a mile, I’ve got a mile and a quarter, and two miles. I’m a seasonal hobbyist.

Are you getting out every day? Twice a week, What’s your routine like?
Definitely every day in the summer. I avoid thunderstorms. I watched an oak tree in our front yard get hit by lightning, and that will make a believer out of you. Otherwise, I generally tend to be an afternoon swimmer because I get up to write in the morning. I have a cup of tea and I do some work.

You’ve released a new novel every two or three years, aside from the gap between your first and second novels. What’s one piece of advice you would impart on someone that is trying to either find consistency or write their first novel?
The gap between the first novel and the second novel was really a function of wondering about who I would be and what I would become; as a professor, a parent. Everything was sort of crashing in on me. It was the moment of realizing that I wanted to be a writer. My kids come first. They’re always going to come first. But if you do that, it doesn’t mean that the writing does not also hang out very close to second place. It’s a question of finding that out of a certain desire. Your question is very difficult because I feel like I just keep at it out of a kind of spite. I’m a stubborn fucker. It’s just what I want to do. At a certain point I realized it’s the only thing I’ve got any real control over.

Being a student of the Stoics, at a certain point you realize that the only things that matter are the things you personally have control over. You’re going to worry about everything else all you want, but it’s not going to change anything in the universe. I just made sure I got to my desk because it was all I had control over; that sentence. I heard Tim O’Brien in Dayton say to a group of students, ‘I don’t write novels. I write sentences.’ I thought, yes, just write sentences and make sure every sentence you write is the best goddamn sentence you could possibly write and then move on to the next one. Then, you’ll be a fine writer. There also has to be that personal desire. I’m going to do this until they tell me I can’t. And then when they tell me I can’t, I’m going to keep doing it.

You mentioned that when you get home from working in prisons, you put an LP on the record player. What’s the first record you grab?
Cat Stevens. Tea for the Tillerman. It is one of the perfect albums. I love listening to Who’s Next. I also love listening to early Jackson Browne, early Jackson Brown. Joni Mitchell.

I have a question for you. Somebody waves a wand and gives you all the resources and all of the skills for a particular occupation or way of life. It’s not an ontological change, but it would be a skill and a resource change. What would you do?

It’s a tricky question because all of the things that I like doing are so much fun because I’m not an expert. That’s the whole point of The Hobbyist. Golf was my first thought, but I don’t think golf would be as much fun if I did it professionally. Or maybe it would and I’m overthinking it. I have these struggles all the time, same with writing. Working every day and being like, am I good at this? Am I not good at this? That’s part of the experience for me. But I’ll go with golf pro. A golf pro who happens to love William Faulkner. There are a bunch of great courses in the Boston area I want to check out. Hopefully I can get up there and we can connect.
The Shattuck is a golf course in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. It’s a crazy course. It’s like whacking a ball through the wilderness. One of my neighbors is Thomas Moore, the writer who wrote Care of the Soul, and he got me back into golfing. Tom Moore and I will golf at Shattuck. Lee Trevino came to The Shattuck in ’73, I think. He played a couple of holes and supposedly said, this is impossible, and just left. If you come to New England, come to New Hampshire, we’ll golf The Shattuck and we’ll fish on Thorndike Pond.