Anthony Doerr is the author of the novel About Grace and a debut collection of short stories, The Shell Collector, for which he won the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A memoir of his year in Italy, Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World, will be in bookstores this June.
LA: I note that your first book, The Shell Collector, begins with a description of a water taxi sloughing the tops off a coral reef, and that your most recent post at The Morning News contains a reference to coral reef devastation. What’s going on here? Why do you care about the coral reefs of the world? Have you seen any of them in person?
AD: I guess I look at it like this: To care about the ecology of coral reefs is not to care about some distant, isolated, irrelevant issue: Everything is connected, the world’s ecologies first and foremost. Perhaps the way I might ask the question is: How could someone NOT care about the health of tropical seas? Any single ecological issue is not worth caring about merely for the “benefits to humanity” (though reefs offer plenty), but to try to stay informed about coral bleaching, say, or wastewater, or oil consumption, or the war in Iraq, for that matter, is a part of being a responsible, curious adult.
We all share this one big clump of iron and magnesium and nickel whirling around the sun, and it is the one thing we will bequeath to our children. So why not be as deeply curious about it as we can? Why not try to understand what is happening to it in the pitifully brief time we’re here? I’ve been lucky enough to spend time on lots of reefs, and I hate to see them change for the worse over time — even as I’m aware, despite myself, that my own visits have added to the devastation in whatever small degree.
All that said, fiction is never quite the place for focusing energy for change: Fiction exists to transport a reader into another person’s life: her time, her place, her heart. But fiction that feels at all political usually falls apart. So I try to keep this in mind always in my own writing: that my first and most important job is only to persuade a reader to allow him or herself to be transported.
LA: I agree. I don’t think you made that mistake in The Shell Collector. To the contrary, the description of the coral reef isn’t there for the purpose of taking a momentary stand against coral reef devastation; rather, it effectively foreshadows the obliviously destructive mindset of the boat’s passengers. I think the way that nature exists as a respected backdrop in your stories, maybe even as a character itself, is what made me feel kinship with your writing. Still, it’s not that political topics — and by that I mean anything important enough to warrant public discourse — should be avoided in fiction, but if one sets out with only a political motive in mind, or even foremost in mind, the project usually fails. What do you think? I recently re-read George Orwell’s 1984. Highly political stuff — and brilliant. I also read a poem in an online magazine the other day that was just dreadful, the politics right on the poet’s sleeve.
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