Your story in this summer’s Fiction Issue, “Opening Theory,” is about a man in his early twenties, a chess prodigy, and a woman in her mid-thirties, who meet when the man is playing at a chess exhibition at the arts center where the woman works. When did you first start thinking about this encounter? Did one of those characters come into focus for you first?
I started thinking about the encounter between these characters about three years ago. The two protagonists arrived in my head together, the same way my characters always have—in twos or threes (or fours or fives) rather than separately. That’s just the way it happens for me. If I only conceived of one character, I don’t think I would know what to do with him or her; it wouldn’t feel like much of an idea at all. But, because my protagonists arrive preëntangled in their various relationships, my job is a lot easier.
In this case, that means Margaret and Ivan entered my life at the same moment that they entered each other’s lives: the moment that’s depicted in this story. Originally, the narrative was told only from Margaret’s point of view—Ivan’s voice came later—but it always began with the simultaneous exhibition game in the arts center where Margaret works. I really liked the idea of writing that scene.
Ivan Koubek, the chess prodigy, doesn’t think he’s all that good a player these days. Do you play chess yourself? How hard is it to play at Ivan’s level and to continue improving? Did you have to do much research when you were working on these pages?
It’s funny—the phrase “chess prodigy,” to me, suggests a small child, which is the same mistake Margaret makes in the story. Ivan is twenty-two, probably past his prodigy days where chess is concerned. And, although he’s talented, he’s far from world-champion material.
I actually don’t play chess myself. I have read a little theory and watched a lot of analysis, and I’m interested in the cultural history of the game, and so on. But the idea for this story arose from my preëxisting interest in the world of chess rather than the other way around. I wrote these particular scenes without doing any research. Later on, I did go looking at blog posts and articles about real simultaneous games, to check the details. Later still, I had to find out whether it was plausible that someone at Ivan’s level would really play a ten-game simultaneous in a small-town arts center in Ireland, but by then I wasn’t prepared to take no for an answer. (I am told it’s at least conceivable.)
How hard is it to play at Ivan’s level and continue improving? I don’t feel qualified to answer that. I suppose I might say I write fiction at a certain level, and I also hope to continue improving. But maybe for chess it’s different. It only occurred to me fairly late in the writing process that Ivan’s relationship with chess might be analogous to my relationship with my work, though the resemblance is far from perfect. He’s not much younger in this story than I was when I wrote my first novel. But he’s probably a lot harder on himself than I was at his age.
The story switches between Ivan’s perspective and Margaret’s as each of them seems immediately drawn to the other. Is this movement from one to the other anything like the way a game of chess might unfold?
Strange as it is to say, I didn’t think of that. In their dialogue, I certainly feel there’s a sense of play, each of them making moves and responding to one another’s positions. But chess is a game of winning and losing; each player is always trying to defeat the other. Ivan certainly isn’t trying to defeat Margaret in this story, or even to reach a stalemate. He seems to sense that they’re playing a different kind of game, in which any defeat is a defeat for both of them. And maybe he’s trying to work out a strategy by which they can share in some success. Margaret, for her part, seems to be interested in watching him try.
Age is a factor that has the potential to change the outcome of the encounter between Ivan and Margaret. If the age differential were the other way around, would either of them be thinking about it?
Oh, I think so. It’s a pretty sizable age gap, considering their respective stages in life. If their genders were switched, the feelings on either side would probably be very different, because of course the social realities of aging are profoundly gendered. But I don’t imagine the encounter would go any more smoothly. For some reason, I think it’s more likely that nothing would happen between the two characters at all.
Partly that’s because, if a young woman behaved as Ivan behaves in this story, that might be considered fairly strange and off-putting, rather than endearing or desirable. I tend to think that men are afforded wider social and sexual margins for their behavior than women are, at every age. Relatedly, Ivan’s talent for chess seems to strike Margaret as an attractive quality. Would a man in similar circumstances find a young woman’s intellectual prowess similarly appealing? It depends, of course, but it seems less likely.
And then, at least in certain social contexts, men are often still expected to take the lead in initiating romantic encounters with women. A conscientious and professional man of Margaret’s age might not feel entitled to pursue a much younger woman who was visiting his place of work. Margaret, too, has doubts about the propriety of her actions in this story—but she can (and does) give herself the excuse that she’s only following Ivan’s lead. So gender is certainly a structuring principle of the relationship that develops in this story, but not, I think, in an entirely predictable way.
This story is drawn from an early chapter of your new novel, “Intermezzo,” which will be published in September. The book traces Ivan and Margaret’s interactions in the months after this first meeting, and those of Ivan’s older brother Peter, a lawyer, and two women—one is his former college girlfriend, the other is a younger woman with whom he has a somewhat transactional sexual relationship. Did you know from the outset how events would unfold? Did anything surprise you as you were writing?
As I said above, Margaret and Ivan occurred to me together, as a pair. But, shortly after I started writing about them, the whole project got stuck. I didn’t know where to go next. Several months later, I suddenly realized that Ivan had a brother—and, in that moment of realization, I felt I could see the brother’s entire personality, and these other important relationships in his life. That’s when the novel as such really got under way. It became a book that was very much about the sibling dynamic, as well as the various love affairs.
I don’t think I knew from the outset how anything would unfold—how any of the love stories would end, or how the relationship between the brothers would develop. But I really enjoyed being immersed in the world of the book. I was constantly thinking of ideas for new scenes and scenarios, many of which never ended up in the novel at all. It was by and large a very happy few years of work for me—with some inevitable periods of despair and crisis, of course, but really very few.
Ivan and Peter’s own relationship also shifts and changes in the course of the novel. Were you interested in writing about brotherhood and the ramifications of their age difference? How much does that determine the nature of their bond?
I can only say that I must have been interested in writing about brotherhood, since I seem to have spent several years doing so, but I can’t explain why. Peter and Ivan just came into my head that way. The age gap between them is never really explained—Peter is ten years older, with no siblings in between—but I suppose that happens in some families. It does structure their particular relationship, very much so, as age difference probably always does among siblings.
In a way, I think Ivan sees Peter as the epitome of adulthood, and Peter sees Ivan as a little boy. The more time I spent with them both, the more sympathy I felt for each of them, in their own ways of narrating and rationalizing their family dynamic. They definitely disagree, but they are also both right, I think. Or, at least, that’s how I felt. But then, as soon as I start writing from a particular character’s perspective, I always lose my critical faculties and start agreeing with them against myself.
What’s this period like for you, when you’re waiting for a novel to be published? Are you working on a new novel at the moment? Or are you still immersed in the world of the characters in “Intermezzo”?
Thank you for asking. This is typically not an easy time for me. I really love writing novels, and I’m very grateful that that’s my job. But I find it stressful to publish my work, and perhaps even more stressful to wait for it to be published. I have wonderful publishers and readers, so it’s really no one’s fault but my own. Sometimes I say to myself, “Next time I write a book, I’m not going to publish it at all!” But that’s just a nice delusion to get me through to the next publication, it would seem.
I am still fairly immersed in the world of “Intermezzo,” I think. (My friends and family are no doubt sick of hearing about Peter and Ivan and the gang.) But, in the past month or so, I’ve had a little bit of a new idea in my mind: a few characters in a particular situation, as usual, and the interesting complications that might result. At the moment, I’m telling myself I’m never going to publish it—just because I think I deserve a little treat. ♦