A way of understanding things

A loving mother fusses over her seven children and the smallest chores such as the buttoning of a jacket become magic ritual. The family is preparing to go to church, all except the father, who never goes. He looks on; remote and clearly caught up in thoughts of his own. Many novels have been written about childhood but few writers have caught the atmosphere of family life as evocatively as New Englander Susan Minot does in her remarkable, elegiac debut Monkeys, a narrative consisting of nine self-contained, impressionistic sequences, one in the first person, chronicling the story of the Vincent family.

Quietly published in the US in 1986, the novel did well and achieved a rare honour for a first book when it was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times' book section. On publication this side of the water, Minot was hailed as a rare talent. For once, the hype was not to be a nine-day wonder. As much as the general reader, writers interviewed frequently mention it Monkeys among their favourite books. Since then, Minot has written a collection of short stories, Lust (1989), and two novels, the elegant, Whartonesque Folly (1993) and Evening, which has just been published. This new novel is the powerful story of a dying woman who confronts her past as she drifts in and out of consciousness. At this eleventh hour of her life, she achieves a rare understanding of everything that has happened to her since a brief romance upended her existence some 40 years earlier. It is an important novel for Minot and reveals an extraordinary artistic maturity.

Even so, mention Minot and the reaction remains to Monkeys - no reader forgets the novel with its echoes of Woolf's To The Lighthouse. Now taught in US high schools and colleges, its success is something she has always kept in context. "I had been writing for a very long time - since I was what, 13, I always kept journals as a way of understanding things, understanding me, I didn't publish my first book until I was 29, so I had spent a long time being a person who wrote, before I ever became a writer." How does she feel about it now? "That's like asking someone how they feel about one of their children." The reply is about as close to snappily New York Minot gets: her demeanour is watchful, yet polite.

Standing outside Hatchard's book store in London's Piccadilly, she is a compact figure: curious, pale faced, knowing and slightly vulnerable, weary. Her father died after a painful illness just a month ago. Dressed in black, casual clothes, in person she barely resembles the image caught in her photographs. Capable and assertive, she is a streetwise romantic who has had her share of grief. Her large, bright blue eyes are direct and she is friendly, if, at times quite formal. Fuss is alien to Minot's nature - she is a calm, intense observer who gives the impression of being very involved, albeit at a remove. Her fiction gains some of its considerable strength from the weight of felt experience which runs through it. Now 42 and having spent last autumn on an American book tour for Evening, she has just returned from Egypt.

It is easy to become used to seeing American writers as public figures, a couple of miles away, Bret Easton Ellis has just been holding court. On hearing Minot's name, he writes a note to her on the fluffy surface of a hotel coaster, entreating her to come to a party he's holding. The message is delivered as the book-shop assistants look on. Minot is pleased by Ellis's gesture: although inhabiting vastly different literary worlds, they are friends. The bookstore is filling with its lunchtime browsers. Across the road, the crowds are filing reverently into the Monet exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. It seems a good idea to join them.

Inside the various gallery rooms Minot, a water-colourist, comments on the lush, vibrant but so subtle works, some of which she has seen before. In common with her writing, her remarks are concise, direct and telling. Despite her years in New York and her cosmopolitan appearance she remains a Bostonian. Her laugh is unexpectedly deep.

She grew up in Manchester, about half an hour north of Boston: "We spent our summers in Maine, my family still has a house there, it is the place I feel most of my heart resides," and she describes the family's special base, an island in a landscape consisting of thousands of uninhabited islands. "We always went there for three weeks at the end of the summer."

The second of seven, she has three sisters and three brothers "three girls, then three boys, then after a gap, another girl". There was another child, a girl, who had died as a baby when Minot was three.

Born in December 1956 - no, she laughs, not at Christmas - "It's Pearl Day actually, the same day as my ex-mother-in-law's. I remember my ex-husband drawing back in horror when he heard I shared a birthday with his mother. He had a difficult relationship with her." The family name is old Boston, pronounced "mine it" - "like you do with gold". Her father came from a wealthy Boston family. "He worked half his life as a banker and a stockbroker, but he wasn't really committed to it - and he married this Irish woman from the other side of the tracks." Mr Minot apparently looked on while his wife raised the children as Catholics. "My mother was very emotional, playful, childlike . . . she really could relate to children - if a child came into a room of adults where my mother was she would immediately get involved. She was third-generation Irish, one of three sisters, all quite beautiful."

What was she like? Minot pauses as if summoning her mother before her eyes: "She was like a 1950s movie star - she had a wide face and beautiful bone structure and she wanted lots of babies." Without wanting to draw the autobiography into a reading of the work, it seems that the Vincent family is based on her own. Minot does not exactly confirm this, but nor does she deny it. "The mother is my mother - she was an exuberant, happy person - but the father is not. I think I was trying to look at the way some men are fathers. It had something to do with my feeling of being not quite right. For that generation, raising children was something that women were left to do."

The family house in Manchester was not particularly grand, but was very pretty. "My mother had a strong visual sense, she liked beauty. This made us all very aware of beauty and colour - and all my brothers and sisters are artists. Mother always gave us crayons and paper, we always kept our hands busy." Her father carved animals and made model boats "that began getting bigger and bigger". Minot's mother died in an accident at 48, when Minot was 21 and the youngest child only seven. Her car was hit by a train. "It had been frosty, there had been an ice storm - she wasn't far from home when it happened." The family's world was torn apart. "There was such trauma, I . . ." She doesn't finish.

The six older children were all privately educated, their schooling paid for by Minot's father's family. Looking back, Minot is now aware her school in Concord was unique. "It encouraged us to discover ourselves as individuals. It was liberal." She says it was the sort of place you could arrive one day to be told all classes were to be cancelled - "we were to take the day off, `students are going to talk to each other' ". Becoming a boarder at 13 coincided with her beginning to keep a journal: she still does and has about 100 such diaries. "I see them as life-savers. It was a way of looking at what I was going through, it was also a way of relating to the world. It was also being with myself."

Memory, and particularly its many ambiguities - "the struggle between remembering and forgetting" - as well as time and the way it works, which are important in her work, has always interested her and she refers to the unsettling experience of returning to journals, and reading detailed passages about events which she had described so carefully at the time, only to discover "I didn't remember any of it".

It seems logical to expect her to say she had a very happy childhood, but she makes it clear "we were not the Waltons". Although not wealthy, the children grew up among privileged families - "some of the people we knew were from the most respected of American families" - her point is that there was a confidence to be acquired from such society.

But her evaluation of her adolescence is a starkly succinct reference to "my agonised teenage years", before moving away from the subject. For her, "writing always came before reading". But she did read and can still remember the excitement of first experiencing J.D. Salinger. A special trio for her was that of Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner - "he was the one who made me go crazy, the one who made me want to write". The poetry of Emily Dickinson and E.E. Cummings were, meanwhile, "just as inspiring as listening to music". Years before she would become interested in classical music, she looked to The Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, the Rolling Stones. Later she would discover Bob Dylan. After High School, she was heading for Boston University but took her BA at Brown where the novelist John Hawkes was one of her teachers. By then she was already reading Hawkes, John Barth and Robert Coover.

Minot looks closely at the world; she can see an epic in the smallest gesture as the often Carver-like stories in Lust confirm repeatedly. A relationship can begin and end with a casual comment or a vacant stare. As one character remarks: "Frank, I could see, was not your vulnerable type. I suppose things didn't matter enough to hurt him." Minot quotes freely from writers as she speaks and, as is evident from Folly, Wharton remains important to her. As Minot is commenting to a remark made about how eloquent a tiny detail can prove she says: "As Edith Wharton said: `The writer is the one behind the tapestry, investigating the knots on the other side'."

Minot's mother was killed four months before she graduated. She helped looking after her youngest sister. Two years were to pass before she decided to go to graduate school; she chose Columbia University in New York. During the intervening years, she continued writing, writing, writing. There was also a variety of jobs from house-painter to carpenter, to working for Greenpeace, to teacher, to editorial assistant on the New York Review of Books, to waitress.

At Columbia she continued writing and reading, while also doing graduate course in film and theatre - both of which she has always seen as pleasures, while writing is work. Russian writers had also become important to her - "Chekhov remains the ultimate hero" - while she describes first encountering Proust as "profound". Nineteenth-century European and early 20th to mid-20th century American writers are the ones she most admires; of Bellow and Updike, she says: "No, they don't appeal to me. I find them unconvincing about women." She praises Flannery O'Connor while remarking "but Edora Welty, I don't know. There must be something I keep missing."

New York suited her. She had begun sending out stories and had also met Ben Sonnenberg, a genuine `book man' who ran a small literary magazine called Grand Street from his dining room table: he was to become a valuable mentor. Also, "I had a friend who worked on the New Yorker." She was getting used to being read. `Thorofare', the final story from what would become Monkeys, was accepted by the New Yorker.

At a book-store function, she met Seymour Lawrence, who read three of the stories. In 1983 he offered her a contract for a novel. "I remember being very worried by that and I said `I only write short stories, I don't write novels'. He just crossed out the word `novel' and wrote in `work of fiction' instead."

Referring to the structure of Monkeys, she says the idea of a series of stories came to her from Salinger. At no time, however, did she feel Monkeys was a collection of stories - "I always knew it was a novel."

After Monkeys was published she went to Italy and it was there she first experienced what it is like to be a published writer. "Except it was all going on in another language. Monkeys was published very quietly in the States. Even now, I don't like the business that is part of publishing a book. Of course, I do it, but" - she grimaces - "it's a lot easier to talk about the books than it is about my life."

It was the autumn of 1987. Work went well in Italy, living on her own in the countryside. On her way back, she stopped at a friend's house in Milan - "before returning the hire car and getting my flight". The car was broken into and "everything was stolen, including my stories. All gone, all I had done there and the previous year's work as well". Attempting to recover the lost work, she found herself in the impossible position of having to ask herself, "what did I write?" instead of "what do I want to say?"

The stories in Lust are direct reports from the battlefield that is human relationships. They are very candid, even flatly realistic - several of the female characters are faced with the reality that men react very different to women in situations. A man's obsession can turn to indifference while a woman is only becoming interested. "Can we please stop talking about this now?" a man requests of his partner. "She did stop and inside her something stopped too."

With Folly, which is set in the early years of the 20th century, she turns to the world her paternal grandmother inhabited. "I think it is interesting the way it is possible to understand something from another time. I had a lot of things, memories and stories."

The elegance and grace of the period- world created in Folly proved Minot's interest in the past and seeing things at a remove. "It's also the fact that regardless of the history, a woman's experience is basically the same." A painful romance and a difficult marriage help her character, Lillian Eliot acquire an important wisdom. By the end of the novel, she comes to experience in practice something she had always suspected - "things which once puzzled her could eventually dissolve over time".

For Evening, Minot looked to her mother's generation, but not her story. The book's major themes are death, memory and desire, and the intensity of feeling. Minot deliberately created a character who throughout her life was never reflective, in order to stress the drama inherent in her finally discovering so much about her life at its end. Although she has been married three times, it is the man with whom she had an intense, three-day romance who the dying Ann Lord recalls. In ways it is a portrait of a woman whose life ended at its beginning. Her children see her as a person for whom objects were important. But it has not been a life without pain: one of her five children has died in an accident and Minot is careful to make the point that Ann Lord never speaks about this loss. "It is not that she is without feeling, it is that she simply can not face the horror of it. There are people like that whose feelings are kept hidden behind a reserve." In the novel it is the sound of a sail flapping that brings back the pain of the accident.

The writing of Folly coincided with the years of Minot's brief marriage. Since then she has done a lot of travelling and painting. Currently working on a screenplay of a love story set in Africa, she has also completed the screenplay of Evening. What does she most want? "I want a baby, someone to look after. When my mother died, I was 13 years older than my youngest sister, so I have some idea of what it means. I see my sisters with their children, I have a great extended family . . it would be a wonderful place for a child. But I don't know, I'll have to see. . .

Of her work she says: "I'm digging ditches, that's what I know, the material of my life."