Readings St Kilda’s Luke May interviews the author of Three Dollars about his latest novel, The Street Sweeper.

In the epigraph to The Street Sweeper, we are presented with a quote from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. With her perennial themes of time and memory, we are immediately aware that this story is essentially about history and remembering. Did you set out with a deliberate attempt to write about this?

Yes, right from the outset, I saw this book as being about history, memory and the inalienable dignity with which each of us are born, irrespective of where we come from, irrespective of our race, our ethnicity, our sex, our religion or our political views. In Anna Akhmatova, whose work I’ve long admired, I found someone who had written with great power and beauty in the service of memory, history and dignity in the face of tragedy and who had also written of hope. When the novel was finished my mind alighted on her work and it seemed the perfect place to rest.

At what point did you realise that the events of the Holocaust and the civil rights movement in America could intersect and tell the story you wanted to write?

One of the places I lived in Manhattan was on the campus of Rockefeller University which is directly opposite Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, one of the most famous dedicated cancer hospitals in the world. It was like a mini-city inside the much larger borough of Manhattan. Patients came to the hospital from all over the city, all over the world for treatment there. And as a consequence of this, visitors came from all over the place to visit the patients.

I used to catch the bus at a stop outside the hospital and see people of all different races, ethnicities and nationalities, all different ages, socio-economic groups and educational levels all in very close proximity to each other.

Sometimes you could see the patients taken out on to the street in wheelchairs to get a breath of air, if not fresh air then at least different air, to feel the wind on their faces, to see the real world perhaps as part of keeping them feeling connected to the world, presumably for their mental health. In addition to these patients, there were exhausted, over-worked stressed-out staff and the anxious visitors on the street too just outside the doors of the hospital. It always struck me as ironic that, so stressed were the visitors and many of the staff as they communed in all sorts of weather outside the doors of the cancer hospital, that they would think nothing of chain-smoking to alleviate their stress. Now to a writer observing this scene, the multitude of smokers outside the cancer hospital, people of all different backgrounds forming an instant but transient community, all of this is the gold that sends you off in search of the goldmine. At the end of the goldmine is the answer to the question, ‘What if, between some of these people of disparate origins, an unlikely friendship were to blossom?’

This ‘unlikely’ friendship that begins the novel is where we glimpse the possibility that in this story these two seminal 20th century occurrences might meet.

Similarly to your previous novel, Seven Types of Ambiguity, your new book is a sprawling epic, with a narrative structure that shifts between character, time and place quite dramatically. Do you find that this is the best way to capture the elusive essence of humanity, or is it simply a stylistic preference?

It’s probably both. Like many people, I look at the 19th century as something of a ‘golden age’ for the novel, for literary fiction. Many of the writers of that period who have been important to me try to deliver an entire world to the reader. I would like to be able to do that, if I can. But it’s also a stylistic preference, not for all the stories I would want to tell but for some. It seems to me a good way to attempt to capture the messiness of this business of being human with its conflicts, conundrums and contradictions and always the private internal anarchy of the mind running riot inside of you as you try to live your life as best you can.

You manage to detour at great length with long illuminating passages of history. There is a fine line between entertaining digressions and essayistic outbursts that could disrupt the dramatisation of narrative – and you tread it impressively. How do you find a balance between what you ‘teach’ a reader without sounding too didactic?

Thanks for saying this. It’s my guess that the success or otherwise of this strategy or device is in the eye of the reader. In the first instance I use myself as the guinea pig by asking myself when I read over a passage, ‘Does the reader need to know more?’ or ‘Is this essential?’ I usually like to keep one or more character anchored not too far off the coast of the apparent digression.

In the last pages of Seven Types there is a line that reads, ‘The facts accumulate until there are enough of them to constitute a history. The history, like all histories, supports conflicting views.’ The Street Sweeper adopts this as its key driver. Do you think this moves it away from being a psychodrama, towards a more sociological work?

I try to steer away from characterizing my own work. My doing it won’t necessarily result in people sharing my characterization of one of my books and it won’t stop people from labeling them as they choose. Once you send them out into the world you lose control over how people view them. I understand that, for all sorts of reasons, people need to characterize a book in one or other way but I think it’s possible for a book to fit more than one category at a time. Why not?

What made you decide to include a list of bibliographic sources at the end?

Given that the book deals with such monumental historical events and also, to an extent, with how history is made, I thought some people might find it interesting to see the sources I consulted.

The Street Sweeper is out now in paperback ($27.95) and ebook ($23.16). You can read a sample of the book below.

A book by Booki.sh