And we went sledding, and I started to tell my daughter the tale that I read when I was 15 years old in high school, which was Edith Wharton's "Ethan Frome." The villain in that novel is Ethan's wife, who is older and sickly and very cranky and incredibly unpleasant and a real destructive force in his life.Īnd as I'm describing the novel to her, it hit me that in the years between high school and now, I had become - if I were any character in that book, I had become that sort of cranky.īENJAMIN. The world was madness, and I was in a fairly constant state of fury and angst.
Why did you want to tell this story using that scaffolding of the Wharton novel?īENJAMIN: So I got the idea - I was actually sledding with my daughter. The character, that Ethan Frome, is also married to a Zenobia. SIMON: So "Ethan Frome" is a familiar name - obviously the title of Edith Wharton's 1911 novel. "The Smash-Up" by Ali Benjamin, author of "The Next Great Paulie Fink" and other books for young readers, joins us now. SIMON: The fallout from the 2016 election is both backdrop and maybe a smokescreen for forces that stir up the lives of Ethan Frome, a startup manager and husband of Zo - Zenobia Frome, an independent filmmaker - and their 11-year-old daughter, Alex. A giant inflatable chicken appeared behind the White House lawn, some sort of protest that no one entirely understood. College students organized walkouts, staged sit-ins, blocked freeways.
What happened?ĪLI BENJAMIN: (Reading) What happened? Parents snapped off NPR mid-story, not wanting to answer questions from the backseat. Ali Benjamin's first novel for adult readers begins with a question.
0 kommentar(er)
