We recently spoke with John Wilson about Grace Mojtabai’s new Slant book, Featherless

Do you recall when you first read something by Grace Mojtabai – and what struck you about it at that time?

Yes. In 2011, when Mojtabai’s novel Parts of a World was published, I wrote a column for Books & Culture about her work. In it, I recalled my encounter with her first novel, Mundome. I’ll quote here from this column. Please forgive the length of my “answer”! I hope it will provide context for the rest of our conversation:

“In 1974, I was working at a bookstore in Eagle Rock, California. In the fall of the previous year, I had started a PhD program in English at Claremont Graduate School. Improbably, it was the fourth grad program in which I had been enrolled—a little like having been married four times by the age of twenty-five. Living in South Pasadena while attending classes in Claremont, I had taken a part-time job at the bookstore, a branch of a venerable Pasadena institution, Vroman’s, where I had spent many hours (and many dollars) as a customer. The Eagle Rock store was located in a brand-new mall (this was the heyday of malls). Soon they were asking me to work full time. Within several months, I withdrew from Claremont.

One of the inducements of working at Vroman’s was the 40 percent discount on books. The main store—which still exists today, on Colorado Boulevard—featured an excellent selection of new fiction. I was browsing there one day in 1974 when a book with a strange title caught my eye: Mundome, by A. G. Mojtabai. From my point of view, the novel had a couple of strikes against it. I looked cautiously at the inside flap (sometimes jacket copy reveals too much ahead of time) and saw that the book (the author’s first novel) was described as “a brilliant self-contained reflection of schizophrenia.” I generally avoid books and movies about mental illness. The reality of it is terribly dreary, and imaginative treatments of the subject (so I thought, and still feel) are almost always loaded with false emotion. Then there was the cover art, a reproduction of Magritte’s The Lovers. On the other hand, the information about the author was intriguing:

A. G. Mojtabai was born in Brooklyn in 1937. She graduated from Antioch College in 1958 with a B.A. in philosophy and a minor in mathematics.

Soon after graduation, Ms. Mojtabai married and moved to Iran, where she lived with her husband in a large, extended family. They later moved to Karachi, Pakistan, and then to Lahore.

When she returned to the United States, Ms. Mojtabai did graduate work at Columbia University, receiving an M.A. in philosophy in 1968 and an M.S. in Library Science in 1970. She lectured in philosophy for two years at Hunter College and is now a librarian at City College. Ms. Mojtabai lives in New York City with her daughter; she is at work on a new novel.

And—another plus—the narrator of Mundome is himself a librarian, an archivist. I turned to the first sentence of the novel:

When I think of our library I think of nothing less than the archive of the human estate, the house of the memory of man, and more than a house, memory itself, and more than memory, the slow cess of the spirit: vanity and devotion, illusion, and the martyred rose of prophecy—torn, yet living still.

I’ve been reading Mojtabai ever since, as her slim and potent novels have appeared at intervals over the years. Even if we concede that every interesting writer is in a sense sui generis, Mojtabai has had a career that distinguishes her as one who follows her own path. In some respects, she could be said to have had an anti-career, as stubbornly resistant to literary fashion as to the imperatives of the marketplace. Her books are not like anyone else’s. She hasn’t been taken up by critics as an example of this or that tendency or school.”

I’m tempted to quote even more (about her longstanding interest in “Religion and the Writer,” the title of an essay published in 1995, for instance)! Hard to believe that thirteen years have passed since I wrote that piece.

Like several of her books, Featherless might be described as a “novella,” a term that has been the subject of a lot of discussion. But perhaps a simpler way of describing Mojtabai’s writing is that she is a “miniaturist”—the writing is somewhat detached, precise, low-key—where “less is more,” so to speak. Regardless of terminology, how does her style resonate with you?

I would unhesitatingly describe Featherless and her two previous books, Shine on Me and Thirst (the latter of which, of course, Slant published!), as novellas. I love that form. But whatever genre they get assigned to, yes, in these books “less is more.” There are always trade-offs in writing; you can’t do everything at once. What she achieves here is something distinctive: “low-key intensity.”

The books by Mojtabai that I have read (and this may therefore apply to all of them) seem to always approach the most serious of topics—old age, as in Featherless, death (Thirst), nuclear bombs, etc.—in a comic fashion, even if the comedy is dry, ironic, aware of human folly but in the end coming down on the side of mercy rather than judgment. Do you see her as a comic writer?

I know exactly what you mean. I wouldn’t call her a “comic writer,” but yes, the tension you describe animates her work and helps to give it a distinctive flavor.

Since Featherless is set in a nursing home, the combination of serious subject matter and comedy seems inevitable. One of the underlying themes of Featherless seems to be the invisibility of the elderly. One of the characters in the story, Maddie, is being interviewed by a rather distracted and shallow reporter, but Mojtabai gives us a glimpse of Maddie’s rich interior life. “Ask me,” Maddie says to herself, realizing in the end that the reporter really won’t ask her anything significant. It’s worth noting that Featherless is dedicated to Mojtabai’s own caretakers. So even if her prose takes a somewhat detached tone, the tang of her own personal experience seems to peek out at times. Did you feel that when reading the book?

Very much so! When I first read her book of stories based on her work as a hospice volunteer, Soon (another resonant one word-title!), published in 1998, the world of hospice-care was very unfamiliar to me—and to be honest, if the book hadn’t been written by a writer I love, I would have given it a pass. But some years later, my wife, Wendy, who has a very tender heart, began working as a hospice volunteer, and continued to do so for many years. It was uncanny, more than twenty-five years after Soon appeared, to read Featherless, drawing on Mojtabai’s own experience researching elder care in all its many forms. I’m immensely grateful that Slant has published it.