Benjamin Lytal’s novel “A Map in Tulsa†is the story of Jim Praley, a young man back in his hometown for a summer during college who falls in love with an artist named Adrienne. Five years later, living in New York, Jim returns to Tulsa when he learns that Adrienne has been injured in an accident. In The New York Times Book Review, Gary Sernovitz writes, “Lytal asks the essential questions: how to be good; how to be an adult; how to live outside one’s head; how to love unselfishly; how to understand if this girl, this town â€" any of it, anything at all â€" are indispensable, and if they’re meaningful enough to turn into art.†In a recent e-mail interview, Mr. Lytal discussed the elements of autobiography in his book, what he’s learned from being a book critic and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
You grew up in Tulsa and lived in New York after attending Harvard. How specifically autobiographical is the novel, apart from the general Tulsa-to-New York path
I would visit Tulsa while writing the novel and think, “What is this mad fantasy I’m imposing on my hometown†But the thing that is autobiographical, plot-wise, is the temptation to spurn New York. When I was in my early twenties, I thought that would be some kind of gesture.
Your protagonist, Jim, is thinking about returning to live in Oklahoma. Did you ever feel a strong temptation to return home after moving away Do you ever still
I still do. For a while all the births and deaths and dramas that mattered to me were taking place in Oklahoma, and I wasn’t there. But the reason I could live there now is more abstract than that. I’ve occasionally felt in parking lots in Tulsa how you’re supposed to feel at the beach: that you’ve returned to the lip of creation and for some reason can rest there, and pretend that none of the rest of this happened.
Jim’s attraction to Adrienne makes sense given who they are, but it also seems tied to a certain self-dramatizing period in a young man’s life. How much do you think the strength of Jim’s feelings for her is attributable to that period
Adrienne is a girl, and Jim is a boy; but Jim is also a student, and Adrienne is a teacher. He doesn’t exactly worship her, but he takes her very seriously as a kind of sensei who can teach him self-discipline, art, personal dignity. A lot of guys my age got their moral compass from someone they slept with. That’s a generational thing. Later in the book Jim looks for a mentor more in the vein of a classical bildungsroman: he wants Adrienne’s aunt, an oil executive, to be his Vautrin or Madame Merle.
How much did you intend the novel as an appreciation of small, modest cities, and as a conscious response to the many novels that romanticize escaping such cities for places like New York
Honestly the way we talk now about red states and blue states, which is crass, helped me to see Tulsa as a foreign country that needed to be explored. And then when I realized how much it bothered me to write about my hometown, how much it felt like a form of trespass, a way to embarrass myself in front of Tulsan readers, I knew I was on to something.
Annie Bourneuf Benjamin LytalFor the past couple of years you’ve lived in Chicago. What do you see more clearly about New York now that you’ve left it
It’s Manhattan that I miss. I always lived in Brooklyn, but when I miss New York (which is often) I want Sixth Avenue and the Fox News building and MoMA. What I’ve learned is that missing New York is socially acceptable. You can go back. Unlike college, or high school.
You were a book critic for the now-defunct New York Sun for several years. Did the nature of that job improve your own fiction Did it have any specific influence on the process of writing this book
I learned what my own taste was. In about 2004 I had a contradiction. I was publishing my experimental metafiction but writing raves about “Gilead†and “The Line of Beauty.†I guess I recognized in those books what it was like to have novel-ready material. I decided I had the heart for it.
You recently told the Chicago Tribune of your time at the Sun, “I was very young, very callow when I started writing book reviews, and I was pretty hard on people.†Are there any books in particular that you look back and feel more positive about than when you reviewed them
There was a memoir, co-written by a married couple â€" “Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York,†by Anne Bernays and Justin Kaplan. I remember a wonderful scene where the man talks about how dicey it felt, shopping for contraceptives in the ’50s. Why did that annoy my young self Because it was anecdotal I guess I thought every book written ought to strain to become a classic, that there had to be something galvanizing to a book. I don’t know: maybe I still think that.
Is there any other notable writing about Tulsa â€" fiction or nonfiction â€" you’ve come across or would recommend
The stone-cold classic is Joe Brainard’s “I Remember.†It’s a compulsively readable collection of one-sentence memories. “I remember when one year in Tulsa by some freak of nature we were invaded by millions of grasshoppers for about three or four days. I remember, downtown, whole sidewalk areas of solid grasshoppers.â€
Have friends in Tulsa reacted to the book in ways that surprised you
I had breakfast with my oldest friend the day the book came out. We had talked about the novel before, how it was a fantasy. But that morning my friend kind of opened up â€" “A Map of Tulsa†was really about us, how the two of us had grown up and come out of our shells. It was all very normal. That felt right.
