Victor Lodato is an award winning playwright and author of the novel “Matilda Savitch.” His latest work, “Edgar and Lucy,” was recently released to much critical acclaim and took him almost a decade to craft. “Edgar and Lucy,” is a five hundred page novel that explores the love, secrets and ghosts of one extraordinary New Jersey family. His work has been published in The New York Times, the New Yorker, Granta as well as Best American Short Stories. Lodato, originally from Hoboken, New Jersey, now divides his time between Arizona and Oregon.
MW: Edgar and Lucy was a nine-year project for you. Did you work on it solidly throughout or was it a book you abandoned and kept coming back to? How have you changed in those nine years since you began the story?
VL: This book was more of a ten-year project. I actually started it before my first novel Mathilda Savitch, but didn’t feel smart enough—or perhaps brave enough—to write it at that point in my life. Edgar and Lucy was an incredibly difficult undertaking, physically and emotionally, and so I did work on other things while taking breaks from it: short stories and plays (I’m also a playwright). It felt kind of crazy to spend so much time working on a single project. But I became so deeply involved with the characters that I couldn’t abandon them. And I think that writing this book did change me. Edgar, the eight-year-old in the novel, has this uncanny ability to love ferociously and to offer kindness in the most unlikely situations, and to offer it to people who don’t seem to deserve it. While working on Edgar and Lucy, I realized how strangely rare real kindness is, when it’s the simplest thing and should be so easy to offer. And now that I’ve woken up from a ten-year dream of writing this book into a world in which there is suddenly so much unkindness, I feel good about putting this story into the world right now.
MW: You call this book a New Jersey gothic novel, which I adore—then at the NYC reading you elaborated with other descriptors like, love story, thriller, even melodrama. I’m sure readers will decide for themselves what category the book belongs in, but what do these labels and terms mean to you?
VL: Well, the book is sort of a mirror-land of my own childhood in Hoboken, New Jersey, and of my hot-blooded, working-class Italian-Polish family. And I do think the novel is a true gothic, in that it’s about Edgar and Lucy’s complicated connection to the past, and there’s definitely a sense of the past as a source of malignant influence. And of course much of this happens in an updated version of the ruined castle, which is the dilapidated cabin in the Pine Barrens, certainly a haunted place. Allowing myself to think of the book as a gothic gave me permission to go with a more heightened kind of storytelling—which felt right for Edgar and Lucy. The emotional temperature of the book is hotter than anything I’ve ever written; the emotions are bigger, balder, crazier. And though there was a certain point when I felt embarrassed to be writing in such a way, I knew that in order to be true to this story and these characters, I had to dive into the water and go for the big opera of it.
MW: It seems like humor and the absurd play a crucial role in crafting characters with questionable morality. Can you tell us about your process in creating characters who walk the line between good and bad?
VL: Since I always write from inside my characters, I tend not to judge them. I can’t imagine writing a novel without loving the characters. Perhaps it’s the writing itself that makes me come to love them. I think that’s why fiction, both the writing of it and the reading of it, is such a civilizing thing. In it, there’s the possibility of learning to love people who are nothing like you—and that’s where the miracle of art happens, and you change. As for the humor: that just comes naturally to me. I can’t imagine telling any story, no matter how painful, without some comedy. Plus, I’m from New Jersey. We find comedy in everything.
MW: should probably mention that Edgar and Lucy are mother and son, so that readers aren’t expecting to walk into a Gothic romance. Parent-child relationships and relationships with elders are important thematically in your work and seem to create a common thread throughout your oeuvre. Why are these relationships important to you? Can you tell us about writing from the point of view of a child and how you access that internal voice?
VL: I grew up in a house with both my grandmothers, whom I adored. The character of Florence is basically a combination of these two women—as if I’d stuffed my tiny polish grandmother inside the larger body of my Italian nonna. As for writing in the voice of a child: I find it liberating to write from the perspective of someone who is still learning the world and interpreting its complexities for the first time. It enables me to address my own fears and anxieties and longings in a very open and innocent way. I don’t have to pretend to have all the answers.
MW: What’s next for you after the book tour? Have you already started working on your next project?
VL: I’m working on a collection of short stories. My most recent story, “Herman Melville, Volume 1,” http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/herman-melville-volume-i was published last month in The New Yorker. I’m also branching out into non-fiction—personal essays like the one published earlier this year in The New York Times “Modern Love” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/style/modern-love-when-your-greatest-romance-is-friendship.html?_r=0 column. Love and kindness—they’re very much on my mind, these days.
You can read more about Victor and his work on his Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/Victor-Lodato/e/B0024JESA8 or his website: http://victorlodato.com
*A version of this interview appeared earlier in the New York Daily News.