You are best known for your novel about journalists, The Imperfectionists. Why did you want to write about visual artists?
The hidden sides of culture fascinate me. In my debut, I peeked inside the news media, then my second novel looked at books and reading, and this one peeps into the art world. I chose artists this time because I’m intrigued by wildly creative people, those who build something astonishing, whether in sculpture or music or painting. For this form of magic, they are treated like saints—yet often act like demons in private. What kind of people are they, our great creators? Tricky, crazed, compelling. The kind of characters I love to write.
There is a persistent idea in how we talk about the lives of artists, which is that it is necessary to make great sacrifices, both your own and on behalf of your loved ones, in order to create great art. How do you think about the artist’s life?
Art is an intensely competitive pursuit, with few achieving their ambitions. Those who rise to prominence often combine blind dedication with glaring egotism. We tend to give them a pass, saying: “Yes, sure, the great artist abandoned his family, snubbed his children, betrayed everyone who ever supported him—but have you seen his pictures?!” My novel doesn’t say that this is right or wrong. Rather, it exposes the cost of art—not the millions of dollars cited in auctions, but the even higher price paid in private by those close to an important artist.
Love is very tricky in The Italian Teacher. When it comes to romance, Bear spreads his love thinly and conditionally over many people, while Pinch becomes passionately devoted to one person very young, then his relationships that follow seem to react to that first love. When you were writing this novel how did you think about love in the lives of your characters?
We crave affection from those who offer it inconsistently, and we devalue affection from those who are safe and steady. This is tragic, for we end up chasing warmth from the undeserving—sometimes, this need curses an entire lifetime. Pinch, the main character in this novel, struggles with that burden, yearning for fondness from his father, who sometimes lifts him up, sometimes casts him down. Until finally, Pinch revolts—and the history of art is changed forever.
The title of the book is intriguing. There are so many other careers, talents, and qualities Pinch wanted to have or to be perceived as having than the title of The Italian Teacher seems to grant him.
There’s irony in the title because Pinch strives throughout to be defined as more than his day job. Yet a theme of the book is status and the agony that it subjects us to. Some seem to care more about posterity than the life passing before them. Many artists, in particular, took up the trade partly to cheat death by enduring in their art. But eventually, they’re gone too, just as completely as the rest of us. In The Italian Teacher, Bear looks sure to live on as a great artist, and Pinch to fade from the record. But will that be their fate?
There are no clear winners and losers in The Italian Teacher, no sense that wrongs are being cosmically righted or that characters get what they deserve. Do you see Pinch, at the end of the novel, as triumphing over his father in some way, or is there something else going on there?
I feel that by the end Pinch gains insight, accomplishment, and love too (even if he doesn’t always see it). As for who wins, I suppose I don’t think that way. The winners in life can be awful creatures, while the supposed losers are often those I want to befriend! Experience is too complex, painful, and joyous to reduce to a thumbs-up or thumbs-down life, I think. Pinch might seem a failed man by some measures. But, as the reader discovers, he achieves something extraordinary with his life—even if the world will never know.
