Adam Haslet interview

This morning, on my way to work, I was listening to NPR, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123542128, and Morning Edition. They were running an interview with a first time novelist, Adam Haslet. His book, Union Atlantic, has just arrived on the bookstore shelves.
Most of the interview was only mildly interesting, mostly because his novel, written and sent off to the publisher, before the collapse of the large banks in 2008, is about just that – the collapse and possible bailout of a major bank in the US and the implication to America’s economic system if it is allowed to fail.
However, what really caught my ear was when the interview turned to human nature, culture and fiction.
"The world is so insanely complex and fast and distracting, and one of the things I think a good book can do is slow the reader's attention down a little bit and give them a chance to think through some of the consequences of these changes which otherwise are so quick that all you can do is react," Haslett says.
So is literature the answer?
"It's an ameliorative," Haslett says with a laugh. "I don't think it's an answer, I don't think it will solve our problems but I think how we pay attention to the world matters and if you can spend time inside an imaginative world then there's a calmness and an ability to think.”
That is what caught my attention. That is exactly why I love realistic fiction. It allows me to slow down, escape for a short while from my too busy life – school, work, son’s wedding, and think about someone else’s life. But it isn’t total escapism. I am drawn into someone else’s life but then invited to stop and think of how this would play out in real life. What would I do in such a situation? There is a certain freedom in the fact that it is make believe and yet, realistic enough to draw me in and make me think.
That would not be the case with fantasy fiction, for me. I have not been able to identify with the characters in fantasy – at least not yet – and that is an important ingredient of the enjoyment for me.
This can also be said of film or, video. A good fiction played out on the screen allows me to get lost in it, leave my world behind for a time and live in someone else’s but at the same time allows me to slow down enough to think and feel, just like a book.
Film and video, however, bring another element to fiction, as we learned this week. The scene, characters, and sounds are not left up to our imagination as much as I thought. We still need imagination to suspend our lives for awhile and become one of the characters, but we are provided many of the details by the director who puts all of this together. As the short video in our study guide suggests, Mise-en-Scene, if well planned, can bring another element to our viewing.
So, I learned tonight that I think I react viscerally to good realistic fiction because of my interpersonal nature. And, I still think that is true to a certain extent; I agree with Haslet, in that. Additionally, I think, as does Haslet, that good realistic fiction can slow us down and make us think about our world, how and where we fit in it. However, I now know that many of my visceral reactions are there because of the staging of the director, cinematographer, sound man and costume designer. Somehow, that is not quite as romantic!