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Thanks to Viking for providing this interview.
A Student of Living Things
by Susan Richards Shreve
Viking, ISBN: 0-670-03758-3
Synopsis:
Set in Washington, D.C. of a near future, a city of floods and frequent terrorist bombings, the tightly knit Frayn family has carved out its own comfortable, if eccentric, existence. Then, in a moment, it takes biology student Claire Frayn to dig into her book bag for an umbrella, her brother Steven, activist and gifted, charismatic law student, is shot down next to her on the library steps. His murder hits the family like a hurricane. Set adrift, Claire easily falls under the influience of Victor Duarte, an enigmatic stranger who claims to know her brother’s killer. But as she corresponds with the criminal mastermind, a composer at a conservatory in Michigan, she finds herself increasingly apprehensive about Victor and his plans for revenge, while she is ever more drawn to the musician.
Interview
Q: Where did you get the idea for the book?
A: The idea for A Student of Living Things began in the fall of 2002 when Mohammed and Malvo, the Washington “Beltway Snipers” were circling the city with random shootings and killings. One afternoon I stopped at Home Depot with a colleague two days after the snipers had killed a woman there. I was waiting in the car for him, scanning the parking lot unable to tolerate my own terror at the scene of the crime as if the snipers would ever hit the same spot twice. I got in the back and tried to crawl under the front seat where I got stuck. I had to be extricated by my friend when he returned to the car. In the spirit of this irrational terror, I began to think about a family in a time of generalized dread like this.
Q: Why is the book set in the near future? Have our cities aught up to tits vision?
A: We seem to be living in a time of generalized fear both external and internal in which we worry that a stranger on the street could turn out to be an enemy, a gathering storm in a hurricane. We’re a culture that forgets bad news quickly but there is a sense of unspecific danger about our lives and in spirit, if not in fact, many of our cities reflect this.
Q: Adaptation is a prominent theme in the book. Does the metaphor of this family’s adapting have broader application?
A: There’s a lovely example of adaptation in the 18th century when industrial waste turned the lichens on the trees black, and white moths adapted over generations to this change as their color became darker. In a general sense, our survival, as individuals, as a part of a family, over generations, maybe even our triumph resides not entirely with fate but what we do about what fate has delivered. The Frayns have a terrible time but in their crazy way they hang together with enough humor and love to endure.
Q: Where did the idea of original music in the book come from and what does it mean?
A: Music leads to Claire’s understanding of love. It’s an art form that needs no translation and ‘art’ seemed the only way this fractured woman and her family could find order in the chaos that came to their lives.
Q: Claire mentions and dismisses the theory that one shouldn’t bring a child into perilous times. What is it to have as you do four children and grandchildren in such a portentous time?
A: Perhaps its a matter of nature rather than sense and I’m a big worrier but I have to believe in the future. I’m from a tiny family and my parents died young.
Q: Is revenge futile?
A: Ultimately, I think revenge is futile. And its difficult antidote forgiveness slides in quietly like a canoe and seems to have something to do with a capacity to hope.
