INTERVIEW:New Zealand's literary scene is vibrant, yet many writers feel like outsiders in international terms. For acclaimed young author Eleanor Catton, there is pressure to be an ambassador for the entire artistic community, she tells ANNA CAREY
‘NOTHING MUCH HAPPENS to most teenagers,” says author Eleanor Catton. “You watch TV and there are all these beautiful 24-year-old actors playing 15-year-olds, having these dramatic relationships, and the real thing is just not like that at all. I think you spend so much time looking at these versions of teenagehood that aren’t real and comparing your own life to them. So you’re always disappointed.”
The teenage craving for drama is just one element of Catton's impressive debut novel The Rehearsal, which has already won awards in her native New Zealand and been acclaimed by novelists Kate Atkinson and Joshua Ferris, who described it as "a glimpse into the future of the novel itself". It centres on a high-school scandal: a 17-year-old schoolgirl has an affair with a music teacher. When the truth comes out, everyone has their own version of events – including the girl's younger sister Isolde, and the students at a local drama school who decide to put on a play based on the story. The story unfolds through a series of dramatic scenes in which characters react to the fall-out of the shocking event. But are we reading about what really happened? Or are we just seeing different people's interpretations of – and fantasies about – the scandal?
“For me the entire book is a whole lot of different meditations on quite a small subject,” says Catton, a cheerful 23-year-old with cropped hair and a wide smile. “It’s wrapped around the idea of the intersection between fiction and reality. The different scenes are all my different approaches to the one central question that was bothering me at the time.”
Catton is fascinated with the idea of the transformative power of performance. “If you walk on to the stage and shiver, it’s cold – you’ve conjuring up that reality because of the way the space works, because of what we understand theatre to be. I really like the idea that this conjuring power of performance means that all these little versions of the affair were no less valid than the actual event, because they were made real by the fact that people were performing them.”
Catton became interested in these ideas at university. “I did a course on the theory of drama,” she says. “And you know everyone has one of those courses that kind of crack open your brain? That was mine.” She admits that she feels less passionate about the subject now. “When I began the first draft I was 20,” she says. “I was really struck by all those ideas about performing who you are and being a witness to yourself in a way that’s a little uncomfortable. Especially as you try to figure out both how you want to experience the world, and how you want the world to perceive you experiencing it. The book helped me exorcise those ideas a little bit.”
Catton will turn 24 in September, but she admits she’s a little tired of being presented as a wunderkind. “I do feel a bit frustrated because it seems like everybody is very aware of my age. It’s like it’s part of the package. And I feel a bit funny about that.” She’s also slightly bewildered by the pressure to be a sort of cultural ambassador for her country, New Zealand. She says that when young New Zealand artists write about international subjects they’re often asked why they’ve chosen to do this, and why they aren’t looking at subjects close to home.
“There’s a built-in assumption that the audience you want for your book is not your own people,” she says. It’s like your book is meant be a form of literary tourism – ‘Look, here’s New Zealand in a novel!’ And I just find that really weird.I’ve been living in the States for a year and I don’t feel that this is the same for writers here – they feel entitled to write about anything and anywhere.” Catton says that New Zealand authors can feel like outsiders in the international literary scene. “It’s quite funny being a writer in New Zealand,” she says. “The literary scene is really vibrant and really happening over there, but there’s always a sense that you’re off stage somehow because you’re so geographically removed from the rest of the world. You always get the sense that things are happening elsewhere.”
That didn’t stop the young Catton devouring books (her mother was a librarian, and she grew up in a house “full of books”) and dreaming of becoming a writer. “I’ve written ever since I can remember, all the way through primary and high school,” she says. “Even when I was a really small kid I had ambitions to be a novelist, so I have a lot of quite hilarious unfinished novels that I started when I was seven or eight.” She even sent one to a publisher.
“When I was about nine I finished the draft of this thing that I called a novel even though it was only about 55 pages. I was a very serious child and I was so determined to send it to a publisher that I looked up a list of publishers and sent it to the only one I’d heard of.”
The publisher didn’t accept this infant work of genius but, which amazes the adult Catton, they sent it back fully annotated with editorial notes. “They’d gone through and said things like ‘this doesn’t make sense’ or ‘why did you put this here?’ They gave me this really constructive feedback which seems amazing to me now because it’s obvious that it was written by a child, or at least someone who wasn’t very good at writing! So it was very encouraging.”
Catton is based in Iowa, where she’s studying at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s taking part in a lot of group workshops, which she seems a little dubious about. “I’m not sold on it, to be honest,” she laughs. “It makes me very stubborn. It always makes me do the opposite of what people suggest. I’m quite perverse in that way. I think sometimes trying to separate out a story into things like character and plot and conflict is not always a good thing.” She does love living in the US, however. “I’ve learned so much stuff just from being in a different place,” she says. “I felt really lucky because I was the only non-American so people would be just talking all the time about things that I know nothing about, and that meant I was asking questions every day all last year. Which is such a great experience, and it’s not something you get in a country you know very well.”
As well as getting to know the US, Catton is hard at work on her next novel, set during the 1860s gold rush on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island. It will, she says, have a slightly fantastical element – she was a huge fan of fantasy writers such as Susan Cooper growing up. And she thinks writing this book will be a very different experience to the creation of her debut.
“I approached The Rehearsal very theoretically,” she says. “I had ideas that I was interested in exploring and the scenes kind of wrote themselves around these concepts. Maybe it was a symptom of how old I was. Now, just a couple of years on, when I encounter a theoretical movement or an idea, I don’t get as madly excited as I did a few years ago. There was kind of an intensity of intellectual excitement that hasn’t died, but I’ve become much milder in my positions. So I think that the next book will be much more character-driven and much more grown-up.”
For the moment, however, she’s enjoying travelling the world to promote the book – although she didn’t initially feel totally comfortable performing in the media spotlight. “I’m definitely having fun,” says Catton. “I’m much less nervous than I was six months ago. But it’s still kind of surreal, to be honest. I feel like I’m at a dress-up party and someone’s about to tell me I’ve come in the wrong costume.”
The Rehearsalis published by Granta, £12.99
