Jayne Anne Phillips and Viet Thanh Nguyen: On Writing and War

A transcript to this episode is available here.

Long associated (however reductively) with the dirty realism era of American literature that encompassed such disparate voices as the late two-time Fiction finalist Raymond Carver, 1996 Fiction winner Richard Ford and poet Carolyn Forché, the rewarding oeuvre of novelist and short story writer Jayne Anne Phillips has traced the triumphs, depredations and folkways of everyday Americans for more than 45 years. In an era of increasing balkanization in Western letters, her early work inspired a formidably eclectic array of literary descendants, presaging both the picaresque streetscapes of cult Cuban novelist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez and the early cyberpunk vignettes of science fiction lodestar William Gibson. 

Last year, she received the 2024 Fiction Prize for Night Watch, a vividly rendered account set in Phillips’ native West Virginia in the aftermath of the Civil War. The novel follows a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her traumatized mother as they struggle to heal. In this episode, she is in conversation with 2016 Fiction winner Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer), a similarly heterodox writer and incumbent Pulitzer Board member.

Together, the authors discuss writing about war from historically atypical vantages (Night Watch completes Phillips' war-adjacent trilogy of Machine Dreams [1984] and Lark and Termite [2008]), with Nguyen noting that "when I was writing The Sympathizer, the story I was hearing from agents and publishers was, 'Well, we've had enough Vietnam War novels. We don't need any more of them. The market is saturated.' And of course, what they were saying really was we've had enough novels by white men about the war in Vietnam. And I knew that. And so that just made me angry that there were so many more human facts out there that needed to be told, including the handful that I could collect in my own work...". 

The authors also discuss the transformative power of literature, with Phillips reflecting on her "[simple] hope that literature wins out over propaganda, information and conspiracy," and the ways knowledge is passed from one generation to the next. According to Phillips, "I think literature is a kind of time travel. Literature tells us the story. And because human beings are narrative creatures, literature can reach them in a way that simply the facts of history cannot."

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The Pulitzer on the Road Podcast is a production of the Pulitzer Prize Board and is produced by Pineapple Street Studios. Our host is Nicole Carroll, Pulitzer Board member and professor of practice at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Senior producer is Justine Daum, and executive producers are Bari Finkel and Pulitzer Administrator Marjorie Miller.

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