Five Questions with Christopher Anthony

Moira McAvoy: Can you shed any light on “Like the ‘h’ in ‘uh-oh’,” the title of your piece in issue 9.1? My personal theory is that, as they are two different “h’s,” it’s about different (and inconsequential) means to the same end.

Christopher Anthony: It’s a line from a Joseph Brodsky poem that I’ve carried around with me for nearly seven years. For a while, I couldn’t remember its source. I read it in a translation class taught by Michael Hofmann, and at one point, I asked my friend who was in the course with me if he remembered which Brodsky it came from, but he said he didn’t remember the line at all. Thanks to the internet, I just found it (“The Thames at Chelsea”).

I think you’re onto the meaning. The poem asks, “How did you live in those years?” I assume it means Brodsky’s early years, when he grew up in the Soviet Union and was later sent to prison camps there. The poem answers itself, “Like the ‘h’ in ‘uh-oh.’” And while I can’t say that the character’s experiences in the story are in any way comparable to the terrors Brodsky experienced in the Soviet prisons, I do feel that in many ways the consumerism in the story leads to the same sort of banality that Brodsky writes about in, say, his essay about his day-to-day life during the time he lived in his parents’ apartment in Russia.

MM: Fiction is valuable in that it can show us hard truths without making them hard, often through humor. This story specializes in hard truths of the everyday variety, such as the way that focusing on something incessantly–like how much sleep you get or what junk food you’re eating–rarely does nothing to improve its effects. What led you to wanting to write about this sort of character?

CA: Just living it! My cell phone has started to tell me how well I sleep each night. And I feel much worse than I did before it started to do that.

MM: You do a lot of book reviewing on your website. What’s the best book you’ve read this year?

CA: I blog a review of each book I finish, shortly after I finish it. My friend Vi Khi Nao had such a blog and I loved reading her reviews.

So, I’ll pick two: The best new book I’ve read is Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, which is an unbelievably rich and lifelike (in unexpected ways) novel out in a translation by Susan Bernofsky. And the best older book I’ve read is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which is a classic piece of anthropologic fiction, a great adventure, a political novel, and a love story, all at once.

MM: How did you start writing?

CA: In a three-ring binder open on my lap in the green bucket chairs of the school bus that took me to elementary school in the mornings. I had this great pen that had the Chicago Cubs’ logo on it.

MM: What can we look forward to seeing from you down the line?

CA: Words, words, words.