In your story “The Pool,” a young couple, with two little children and another on the way, move into a house with a swimming pool in suburban Los Angeles. A seemingly mundane premise, and yet, from the first paragraph, the narrator—the husband/father—makes us aware of the many potential dangers lying in wait around the house. What set this story in motion for you?
This is one of my rare memory pieces, in which I mine the past for drama and resonance by way of opening a window onto my own hapless participation in the human condition. That wife is mine, those children are mine, that house was mine. This is fiction, however, and the events have been remodelled to fit the architecture of the story (and, yes, I did make the mad leap from the roof on the impulse of the moment). And the snake? It lived in its world and I lived in mine.
There’s a risk of the children drowning in the pool or being bitten by spiders; there’s the danger of a brush fire on the nearby hillside; and more. There are multiple Chekhovian guns, and I won’t spoil the story for anyone who hasn’t read it yet by saying how many of those guns are eventually fired. In the meantime, the narrator chooses to do next to nothing to keep these things from happening. Instead, he throws almost daily pool parties and neglects his pregnant wife and his kids, like a Nero playing his fiddle before Rome burns. What’s going on in his mind? Is his fear of adulthood stronger than his anxiety about his family’s safety?
Yes, I think you’ve diagnosed it exactly. When I was younger, I ran at the world headlong. Now that I have the wisdom of age, I foresee the potential fatality in everything and try to moderate my behavior accordingly. Still, most days, I wind up bleeding.
As for the tension that underlies the story with a steady ominous pulse, beginning with the narrator’s assertion at the end of the first paragraph (“The kids aren’t going to drown”), this is a way of both propelling the narrative and opening it up thematically. Will he be made to pay for his hubris? Will the forces of nature bring him and his family down? What about those snakes and spiders and overhanging branches? The release doesn’t come until the final line, and it is baptismal and pure.
Is the narrator’s mind-set also that of many Californians—aware of the risk of earthquakes, fires, mudslides, and other dangers, who nevertheless choose to continue living there? Or, for that matter, that of any of us who live in areas with the potential for natural or unnatural disasters to happen? Are we all in denial?
The California mentality with regard to natural disaster is a variety of how any of us anywhere try to get through each day without the worst happening. It’s called self-delusion. Our lives are a tenuous balance between living in the world—embracing it—and living in fear of its lethality and indifference. Do you have insurance on your car? Your house? Your life? As our narrator is beginning to discover, parenthood brings all the risks and hazards of quotidian life to the fore.
“The Pool” will be the final story in your next collection, “The End Is Only a Beginning,” which comes out in 2027. Are the stories in the book linked in any way? Why did you choose “The Pool” to close out the collection?
This is my thirteenth collection. When I was putting together my first—“Descent of Man”—I asked my then teacher, John Cheever, how he ordered the stories in his collections. He said that he liked to put three or four strong ones up front and save an equally powerful piece to close out the book. Sound advice. As is arranging the stories to play off one another. And, no, the pieces in “The End Is Only a Beginning” are not linked in any way I’m aware of, though certainly there are thematic motifs that play out through this book and the body of my work. “The Pool,” I hope, achieves a kind of grace and power in its final lines, drawing the reader back into the story to wonder all over again about the narrator’s psychological state and what it might mean for his wife and children moving forward. How do you get to become mature, anyway? And, once there, how do you express it? ♦
