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Carey tales

By Loren Keller

Napoleon Street is a major thoroughfare through Edward Carey’s imagined metropolis of Entralla, birthplace of the titular twins of his novel Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City.

“Perhaps the most cultivated street in our city,” Carey writes, it is named after “a certain celebrity of diminished stature” rumored to have slept on the stage of city’s opera house one night as his disheveled army was in retreat.

It may come as little surprise, then, that Napoleon (as well as Voltaire and Robespierre) will turn up in Carey’s next book, a historical novel that takes place in Paris during the French Revolution – “a time written about perhaps more than any other, at least in Europe,” the novelist, illustrator and playwright says.

Carey, a visiting faculty member at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, will read from his new work at 7 p.m. Thursday at Theatre Cedar Rapids as part of the Metro Library Network’s “Out Loud!” author series. Also reading will be Carey’s wife Elizabeth McCracken, a Writer’s Workshop graduate and author of three books of fiction, Niagara Falls All Over Again, The Giant’s House and Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry?

The Detroit Free Press called Carey’s first novel, Observatory Mansions, “a sublime take on the Gothic horror novel.” Carey’s admitted habit of writing “dark, grim, listless fairy tales” continued in the haunted fantasy of Alva & Irva and his next book, which he hopes to finish over the summer, will follow that pattern.

“If you think about it, Napoleon has actually sort of become a fairy tale himself: the big ogre, or at least you see him almost literally being a giant in some Goya sketching,” Carey says from his home in Iowa City. “Even if I would try to write something that isn’t a sort of dark fairy tale it would out turn that way.”

A lifelong obsession with fairy tales – “I blatantly refuse to step beyond what some see as a permanent attachment to childish things: illustrated books, fairy tales,” Carey has written – has also carried over into his teachings at the Writers’ Workshop.

“I had students write some fairy tales themselves that were just fantastic. You can think that Kafka really wrote fairy tales – it’s really giving yourself the permission to have that imagination,” Carey says. “It’s not just for children.”

That is also reflected in what Carey likes to read. That he and McCracken are parents of a one-year-old boy is probably just a happy coincidence.

“I spend about as much time reading children’s literature as I do reading so-called adult literature,” he says. “If you read those great stories, it doesn’t matter who they’re for; it’s what carries you through as a reader."

(He cites M.T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. I, winner of the 2006 National Book Award for young people’s literature, as “one of the most extraordinary things I’ve read in the last two years.”)

Carey senses that readers have grown more open to experiencing the sort of darkly drawn worlds of Observatory Mansions and Alva & Irva and other fantasy-inspired fiction.

“I think there has been a shift,” he says. “I’ve been discussing this with students and friends and other writers over this semester. I do think there’s something about the rise in children’s literature, for example, that (J.K.) Rowling and, more impressively perhaps, Philip Pullman, have created a kind of enjoyment in that sort of imagination.

“I think it’s a very exciting time in writing. I don’t have anything against Carver and Cheever and people like that. But I think there is a sort of shift going on. Graphic novels are taken with a great deal more seriousness than they used to be and actually great art is coming out of it, in terms of writing and illustration.”

Carey has spent much of the past decade wandering the globe; the UK native and former resident of Paris wrote and illustrated Alva & Irva while living in the capital of Lithuania, Vilnius (like the novel’s imagined Entralla, “not a famous city.”)

“I came up with the idea of it because I didn’t know where my home was, or where my home would be,” he says. “This was before I met my wife, so I was trying to discover a homeland, what that was and what that could mean.”

Carey concedes that traveling will get harder as the couple’s young son grows, but the family is heading for England this summer. Then they will move to Cambridge, Mass., where McCracken wiil enjoy a non-teaching scholarship at Harvard University.

“We’ll both be writing in Cambridge for a year, which will be great, and then after that we’ll be back here,” Carey says. “Elizabeth and I both feel that we should get a home but we’re not quite sure where it should be.”

Carey says living with another novelist has been considerably less difficult than settling on a home.

“We are each other’s first readers,” he says. “Elizabeth is extremely generous and it doesn’t seem to be a problem. Many people say, ‘What? Two novelists together? Are you crazy? Where do you go – nobody goes anywhere.’”

But married life for Carey and McCracken has clearly been much the opposite.

“We’ve lived in various different countries,” Carey says. “It’s an odd thing. Some writers as couples – one might be a poet and one might be a novelist. That’s probably more sensible, but here we are, this is what’s happening. It seems to be going quite well.”

Carey and McCracken will read from their new work at 7 p.m. Thursday at Theatre Cedar Rapids, 102 Third St. SE. The reading is free and open to the public. The series continues June 19 with Cedar Rapids native and bestselling author John Sandford.