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Expatriate American writer Jonathan Carroll has lived in Vienna for the last 20 years. He has enjoyed critical acclaim for his short stories and his novels, beginning with The Land of Laughs, which has just been reprinted.

The Wooden Sea is the last book of what I call "The Crane's View Trilogy," which comprises Kissing the Beehive, The Marriage of Sticks, and The Wooden Sea. The town of Crane's View is indeed based loosely on Dobbs Ferry, where I grew up. When I was 12, a friend and I found the body of a girl who had been murdered floating in the Hudson River. For years I'd wanted to write about that incident. When I did in Kissing the Beehive, I discovered there were more stories and characters in this small town and I'd need a few books to get them all down.

What kind of research can you do for a book like The Wooden Sea?

Really there is no way to research a story as wild and woolly as this one. There are basically two kinds of writers -- those who know what will happen in their stories and those who don't. I'm one of the second -- I sit down at the desk with a first sentence or a first paragraph and that's all. I never know what will happen in one of my books or stories from one moment to the next. As a result, it is sort of like taking a huge unruly dog for a walk in unfamiliar territory. After a few steps you don't know who's walking who, but if the surroundings are interesting you might be in for one intriguing walk. The premise I did have in writing The Wooden Sea was: what would our 17-year-old selves think of us if we were somehow able to meet, and they could see what we have done with "their" lives? Would they be proud? Disappointed? Delighted? Outraged? Or all of the above? With that question in mind, I put a collar and leash on the story and let it pull me wherever it wanted to go.

When you started writing the book, did you have any idea what would happen when 47-year-old protagonist Fran McCabe met his 17-year-old self?

None at all. I watched how these two guys circled each other, the questions they asked, the answers they gave, but still, right until the end of the story, I didn't have a clue what would happen to either of them. Naturally I kept putting myself in McCabe's place -- what would my 17-year-old self think of me now? Certainly that both clouded and cleared up the issue at different points in the story. It made me smile to think I would probably do all I could to impress 17-year-old me with the life I have now. I'd want him to like it and hopefully look forward to it. But you know kids -- offer them pate and they prefer McDonald's.

Does the young Frannie McCabe echo the young Jonathan Carroll?

Young Frannie McCabe was a lot tougher than I was. I based the character of McCabe on a couple of my boyhood friends, both of whom are dead now. One was killed in a gun battle with the police after he was caught trying to kidnap a woman. The other friend died in Vietnam.

Do you ever dream about your characters?

No. In fact, when I have completed a book, I almost never think of the characters again unless someone brings them up in conversation. A writer spends so much time with his characters when he's writing that I know I'm pretty damned sick of them by the time I'm finished work for the day and/or with the book altogether. If they appeared in my dreams I think I'd shoot them all -- or at least send them back to their rooms with no dinner.

I know a lot of women who enjoy your books -- in particular, the strong female characters.

I would much rather hang around with women than men. As a result, I literally have no male friends. In the novel I'm writing now, the main character says men are glasses of water whereas women are oceans, and I think he's right. If you want to learn about life, talk to a woman. If you want to learn how to fix a car or short a stock, talk to a man. Men want answers and quick fixes, women simply want to explore and look at subjects from every possible angle. That approach is far more interesting to me and why I spend so much time with women and creating their characters when I am thinking them up for my books.

How long have you lived in Austria?

Twenty-seven years

Living in Vienna do you find yourself to be, as we might imagine, soaked in the history of Sigmund Freud and the other early psychoanalysts?

No, not really. I used to live two blocks away from Freud's house in Vienna's Ninth District. But the only time I actually went there was with Stephen King when he came to visit and wanted to see those hallowed halls. I like Freud the literary stylist. Freud the analyst seems rather stiff, and, in retrospect, groping in the dark. It's easy to say that in hindsight but when you read his accounts of his patients' suffering and how he perceived the causes you have to wince sometimes.

Do you follow or believe in any one psychoanalytic system?

I love the work of Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. Adler is more pragmatic, better at giving us instructions about how to get through our every day. But Jung gives me more insight into what I am trying to do in my professional life and just which of the inner demons I should heed and which I should ignore.

You went abroad to teach English. Do you still teach?

I stopped teaching school for almost a decade, but then realized how much I missed the interplay in the classroom -- the frisky give-and-take with students, their curiosity and desire to search out a subject's every nook and cranny. So I went to my school, The American International School, and asked if I could teach a little. I recently went back and it's done me a lot of good. One thing I've learned is how important it is for a writer to get away from his desk for a while everyday, if for nothing else then for a little perspective. Teaching is a big help there.

What advantages -- or disadvantages -- does living abroad have for writing a novel set in the U.S.A.?

I don't know if there are advantages per se. When you write about a place you are not physically in, you tend to think harder about it and pay more attention to detail. It is not unlike looking at snapshots of a trip you took long ago. You look at them with greater scrutiny, and see things in the pictures you didn't see when you were there. The disadvantage, of course, is not being able to walk out the door and simply look around. The British writer Lawrence Durrell was asked why he felt compelled to go to a place before he wrote about it. He said, "Because I need to get the invisible smell of that place before I can capture it on paper." He had a point.

Ever feel like returning to the U.S.A.?

I returned to the U.S. in the middle of the 1990s for almost two years. I lived in Los Angeles and wrote screenplays. It was a nice life, but one day I realized I simply missed living in Europe too much, so I went back. My wife and I will probably return to America at one point and live somewhere by the Atlantic ocean, but for now we're happy in Austria.

Have you written any screenplays from your own books?

Yes, but as is so often the case with the world of film, I was hired to write the screenplays by different producers but the projects never went beyond a certain point. Money was banked but not much beyond that. For those who are interested, they can go to my website www.jonathancarroll.com and read the screenplays I wrote of my books After Silence and Voice of Our Shadow. As to work I've done on other people's films, I never talk about that, because my work for them was script doctoring, not creating. I don't think it's right for a roofer to take credit for building a house.

Do you ever write in other languages? If so, do you find there is a difference in your writing?

I don't write in other languages, although I do read in several. I am in awe of people like Conrad and Nabokov who in middle age learned a second language so well that they were not only adept at writing it, but became acknowledged masters. One thing you learn when you live in another culture is one can learn another language pretty quickly, but to learn its nuances can take a whole lifetime. A great writer is almost all nuance, and that's the trick.

How do you find writing short stories different from writing novels?

Novels are marathons. You start slowly and pace yourself. Drop back a little when you come to a hill, push a little harder when you're on the flats. Short stories are a 100-yard dash. Often I've heard it said stories are harder to write because you're working in a much smaller space. But the people who say that are usually short story writers so I'm a bit dubious of that appraisal. It seems to me most good novelists write good short stories, whereas story writers have more trouble going the distance and it shows. For example, many of Irwin Shaw's stories are pure bliss, but this is the guy who wrote The Young Lions and Two Weeks in Another Town. On the other hand, none of John Cheever's novels are of the same quality as his very brilliant short stories.

You seem to be most popular in Poland. Any ideas why?

That seems to be changing, although sales in Poland continue to be very high, thank God. I think my audience for years has generally been outside the U.S. Generally speaking, U.S. readers are more comfortable reading things that fit in specific genres. Although my books are 'easy to read', they defy genre classification because they slide in and out of lots of them -- mainstream, literary, suspense, fantasy . . . and many people don't know what to make of them. Outside the U.S., for example in Japan and France where my books are also very popular, their readers want most to be absorbed into a whole new vision of the world, genre be damned. As a result, they have been extremely enthusiastic in their response to my work. Especially in the last couple of years. Sometimes you write for an audience that isn't there yet. If you're lucky, you live to see the theater fill up before you die.

When will you next be coming over to the U.S.A.?

I don't go to the U.S. very often anymore. I will be at the World Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis in 2002 but I don't think before then.

Are you working on anything at the moment?

Yes. A new novel and a film I have been commissioned to write for a French production company.

Jonathan Carroll recommends:

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

The HIS DARK MATERIALS trilogy by Philip Pullman

Ellis Island and Other Stories by Mark Helprin

American Gods by Neil Gaiman (to be published in May 2001)

Give Us a Kiss by Daniel Woodrell

Mortal Memory by Thomas H. Cook

Skellig by David Almond

M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio by Peter Robb

The Wooden Sea

Read the first chapter of The Wooden Sea

Search for Jonathan Carroll's books on BookSense.com

* A March/April Book Sense 76 pick
“If you’ve ever awakened from a beautiful dream fraught with bizarre symbolism . . . you may have been reading a Jonathon Carroll novel. His optimistically cynical works foist growth upon even the most unwilling of his characters. His metaphors have a richness and originality that begs to be read aloud to the nearest passerby. And, like a really good dream, this book stays with you a long time.”
- Paul Hanson, Eagle Harbor Books, Bainbridge Island, WA

Author photo by Ekko Von Schichow.

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