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When I was looking back for things to know about the nineteenth century, I didn’t feel that the only thing to know was Huckleberry Finn. Also, I didn’t feel that everything I needed to know was in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I think it’s unfortunate that some reviewers act as if there is an antagonism between the two. There’s a lot about American literature that’s bifurcated: never the twain will meet, as it were, never the Twain will meet the Stowe. Yet there’s no reason in life for that to be. I came to see the book as a kind of family reconciliation.

Q: Yet you have problems with Huck Finn, no?

A: My beef against Huckleberry Finn is a purely readerly beef: I think it’s boring. It’s hilarious to me that I’ve been so attacked for thinking it’s boring. I’ve always thought that taste is not a moral issue. From the beginning I’ve told my kids, de gustibus non est disputandem, about taste there’s no disputing. So I thought it was very interesting and funny when my taste was attacked or seen as a sign of stupidity or intransigent female-ness.

Q: What challenges arose in attempting a textured treatment of slavery?

A: I began with the assumption that slavery was an abomination, yet realized there was a need for some sort of evenhandedness. I did not attempt to draw the slave-holders as villains. When Lidie goes among them, she realizes that the issue is more complicated than she thought. When she comes away from the whole experience, and has to give that speech in Massachusetts, she doesn’t know what to say; it’s all a tangle. She doesn’t know how to be ideological anymore, because experience—the complexity of experience—has destroyed the simplicity of ideology.

Also, though I adore Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it was important to me to have Lorna escape from a plantation that differed from the one depicted by Stowe. I wanted Lorna to escape from a place where she was treated reasonably well in order to separate issues of survival from issues of freedom.

Q: To what extent did content determine form?

A: Loma had to have the last word. She is the owned person, and the last word is I don’t want to be that person. So that’s kind of why I structured the novel the way I did, to have Lorna trump characters such as Helen and Papa. I also wanted to bring Lidie to a point where she knows what the cost of acting will be. At the end of the novel, she says we were never surprised again; she has paid the psychological cost of seeing incredible conflict right in front of her eyes, of believing the unbelievable.

Q: Loss—whether of an illusion, a loved one, or a way of life— appears as a motif throughout your novels.

A: I’m the girl who wrote about a whole loss civilization [The Greenlanders], so clearly that’s something that’s on my mind. Somebody always dies in one of my novels; sometimes everybody does. The idea of coming back from loss fascinates me. How do you go on from a serious loss? I think about that all the time. I don’t have anything theoretical to say about it, however, except what I’ve said with my work.

Q: More often than not your characters endure loss and are enlarged by their trials.

A: The writer John Hersey [A Bell for Adano; Hiroshima] once said to me after reading Ordinary Love & Good Will that he thought my characters felt a degree of joy that at this point in the twentieth century was unusual. So I think that my characters get by because they don’t come. to what happens to them with the expectation of despair or even stoicism; they come with the expectation of pleasure and happiness. When things go wrong, they take it seriously, and suffer, but they’re suffering both from their expectations as well as the actual wound. Often my characters are so excitable that the pain of their situation presents itself as enormous. These characters eventually persevere, but it’s hard for them, because of their expectation of something good.

This raises the issue of the true truth: is it a tragic truth or a comic truth? And in every person’s life the