Anna Bruno and I met in Iowa City about a decade ago, long after living out our own coming-of-age stories, when we were just beginning the journey of new motherhood. In fact, in our first interview for Guernica, we discussed how her debut novel, Ordinary Hazards, reads like an immersive monologue of a mother and businesswoman who is on her metaphorical deathbed in a bar, reflecting on the moments that led up to the worst day of her life. I loved this slow burn of a novel, and yet I was intrigued when I read an early draft of Anna’s second novel, Fine Young People, which could not be more different. It is narrated by Frankie, a college student looking back on the end of her senior year in a Catholic high school in Pittsburgh, where she and her best friend, Shiv, conducted an investigation into the long-ago mysterious death of a hockey player named Woolf, who ends up being more relevant to their lives than they could have ever imagined.
This book understands the magical and confounding time of adolescence, while also astutely examining the lives of the adults they interview who are looking back on their own high school days. Not only does it offer insight into grief, motherhood, friendship, hockey, and Catholicism, but it’s also a suspenseful page-turner. I was thrilled to catch up with Anna about how she transitioned to writing such a different second novel, what it means to write literary suspense, and how to delicately tackle subjects like Catholic identity without alienating faith-based readers or secular readers who are either uninterested in religion or skeptical of it.
— Maria Kuznetsova for Guernica
Maria Kuznetsova: How did you transition from writing more of a character-driven novel to a whodunnit? Were you using the same writer-brain when digging into a suspense novel, or did you have to look at things differently?
Anna Bruno: Literary writers want to take on big human questions. Global questions. Existential questions. But novels are not polemics – at least not the ones I’m drawn to. The fiction that I love is written to entertain. A writer I admire, Sarah Elaine Smith, told me once that all stories are mysteries. She read my first book, Ordinary Hazards, as a mystery. In that book, the mystery is the question of why the narrator is spending her night at a seedy bar. I totally agree with her – all books are mysteries! But they’re not all murder mysteries. And murder is entertaining. It sells. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I endeavored to write a book that does well commercially. Tim Johnston, another literary writer who writes mysteries – most recently, the haunting novel, Distant Sons – told me that he never intended to write genre fiction, but he wanted to raise the stakes for his characters. For the individual character, the stakes don’t get much higher than murder.
Maria Kuznetsova: I’ve heard that every story is a love story, and I love thinking of every story as a mystery–because in the end, we are always chasing the “why,” not the “what.” I wonder if writing something that isn’t a mystery is harder, because you have to create the stakes – will this couple stay together, will this family survive in a new land–and sometimes, they just may not seem high enough, but here, you have these built-in stakes. However, when you have built-in stakes like a potential murder investigation, there are also these built-in plot points you may have to hit, like interviews, reading old newspaper articles, having new revelations, and so on, which might make it harder to work in the big ideas. I wonder how you got into the “deep stuff” when you have a certain investigation plot to follow, and you don’t want to slow the story down with, say, an exploration of grief or Frankie’s best friend Shiv’s dad joining the Hare Krishnas or some hypocrisies within the Catholic church. How did you write a page-turner that engages in such big questions?
Anna Bruno: Sneaky, right? Readers are turning pages, finding clues, trying to figure out who killed this hot-shot hockey player, and then hopefully they turn the last page and they go to their book clubs and find themselves talking about religion and philosophy and secular gods like money and sports and power and privilege. And ideally they feel joy–the joy of being alive, of being in communion with other people, of remembering what it felt like to be young. It’s the experience I have whenever I read a Tana French novel. Like I’ve gotten so much more than a mystery. In The Witch Elm, the main character unravels because he’s been attacked and he is no longer the strapping buck he once was, because his memory is shot and he’s physically disabled. As I read, I wanted to know everything the character couldn’t remember, and I couldn’t look away from the train wreck of how he deals with the investigation. The book is a mystery, okay, but it’s also a literary exploration of ableist male privilege. A guy who lives in a world rigged in his favor loses his status, and he is utterly destroyed. He has no capacity to deal.
Maria Kuznetsova: The Witch Elm feels so rich because you’ve got the main character, Toby, looking back on his time in high school after he realizes one of his classmates was murdered, in a new light, which gives it more depth. Which leads me to two related questions – why did you choose to have Frankie narrating back on the story three years in the future, in college, instead of telling it in the moment? And how did you create a teenage character who is deep but doesn’t sound like a forty-year-old?
Anna Bruno: It’s delicate. There’s a big difference between a sixteen year-old narrator and a twenty-year-old narrator. In Fine Young People, there’s a major plot point that brings Frankie home to Pittsburgh (from college). The point of telling is very specific and intentional. Point of telling is so important, and I’m not sure it gets emphasized enough in craft lessons. Why is this character telling this story at this particular moment? Every writer should be able to answer that question. In Frankie’s case, she comes home for a resolution that is hopefully satisfying for her, and also for the reader. So, it just worked out that I had this twenty-year-old narrator looking back at high school from her perch as a college junior. She’s the perfect age to tell this story. High school is still alive in her memory, but she has perspective. She can view her relationships–like the one with her sort-of-boyfriend Ingo–with some remove. She can make fun of herself. She’s also studying religion and philosophy at Princeton. She is immersed in books and big thinkers and ideas. It bugs me when people call young narrators “precocious.” They are not precocious–they are just really smart. They read. They have ideas. I had ideas when I was young. I teach college kids, and they’re cool. They’re articulate. They’re idealistic, and sure, naive. They haven’t been beaten down by the world, or forced to sit in an office all day where they actually get dumber because they have no time to read anything beyond emails and corporate drivel. Am I ranting? I love young narrators!
Maria Kuznetsova: People don’t give them nearly enough credit. And along those lines, I think young narrators, or young people, can be particularly funny, maybe because it feels like at that age, you’re trying really hard to be clever or to impress, or maybe because it just comes more naturally. Along the same lines of me wondering how you worked in all the “deep stuff” while having such a streamlined plot, I’m also wondering how you managed to work in so much humor without taking the reader out of the story or undercutting a murder investigation, which is about as unfunny as things get.
Anna Bruno: A youthful voice lends itself well to humor–not so much satire, which I sometimes find heavy-handed if not executed perfectly–but just a kind of irreverence that is refreshing. The humor in your books works this way–Oksana is hilarious! Young people can look at adults with clear-eyed, and often humorous, contempt. Right now, I’m reading Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible for my book club. It has this insane climate crisis plot, but it starts innocently with a bunch of kids whose parents rent a mansion together for the summer. The kids do everything in their power to dissociate from the adults, as they observe their grotesque behavior. Talk about contempt! It’s hysterical. Devastating but deeply funny. The best kind of book, in my opinion. This is a long way of saying that I found so much joy in writing about young people, who love their friends and parents and teachers–who have hope. And then, through their eyes, I got to poke fun at the hypocrisy and corruption of institutions, and the adults who control them.
Maria Kuznetsova: Your humor was just one of the many things that kept this coming-of-age novel feeling surprising instead of just falling into tropes. Another was how you usually expect some big love plot in a high school story (though I do adore The Spectacular Now!), or a lot of bullying, but this skirts that and focuses more on family and friendship. Were you consciously thinking of what a “typical” high school novel was like compared to yours? How did you keep it feeling fresh?
Anna Bruno: When I was writing Fine Young People, I thought about how campus novels often satirize or vilify young people as privileged brats, who are given everything in life, only to realize their lives are empty and meaningless. So they act out in some way. Obviously, I’m talking about Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, and to an extreme degree, Donna Tartt’s murderous characters in The Secret History. I love both those books – don’t get me wrong – but that was not my experience of prep school or college. The kids were really nice–there was not as much bullying as there was in public school (where I went through eighth grade). The kids were smart – some academically gifted–multicultural, engaged, and civic-minded. I’m not saying there aren’t horrible kids lurking around prep schools, but I do think there is a turning-the-corner in adulthood, a point when people aren’t just angsty and alienated, but they become corrupt and maybe even evil, usually having to do with money and power.
Maria Kuznetsova: I loved the moment when Frankie and Shiv are saying that maybe their real god is the Starbucks Siren logo – I felt like they were hinting at a future where they would just be more focused on working hard and paying for that latte. I loved the banter between those two so much. If every story is really a love story, then this feels like a (platonic) love story between Frankie and Shiv. How did you develop Shiv as a character who is from a different race and religion in a sensitive way?
Anna Bruno: Shiv is (loosely!) based on my best friend in high school, to whom the book is dedicated. Shiv is from a different generation than we are (and everything she does is fictional)–but she’s Indian and Hindu because my best friend happened to be those things. I wrote her character out of absolute love and admiration, which is the best way to write a character because the reader can sense it. Early readers have told me that their favorite thing about the book is Frankie and Shiv’s friendship, which I love because I wanted Fine Young People to be a friendship novel. So much is written about romance at their age – and young love is intense, I get it. But it’s also brief. Friendships can last forever. And that’s so beautiful–the idea of knowing somebody when you’re a kid and still knowing them in middle age, and old age.
As I developed Shiv’s character, her religion – and her father’s choice to abandon his family life for religion – became important thematically. The novel is not just about a bunch of Catholic kids. It is about religious pluralism and its decline, as secular gods overtake the school (and society).
Maria Kuznetsova: It doesn’t feel like a novel about a bunch of Catholic kids, and yet, a lot of the discussion with Father Michael, Frankie’s mom, and even in relation to Woolf definitely has a focus on Catholicism. How did you manage to tackle such a capacious subject in a novel without feeling like you’re being overly preachy or overly critical?
Anna Bruno: I set out to write about a Catholic school because I wanted to write about my personal religious identity (write what you know, and all that). But as I wrote about the school, I realized it was almost completely secular. The priorities of the place–Ivy League admissions, the endowment, sports–were all idols. The tectonic shift toward secularism is one of the most profound social realignments of my lifetime. In a single generation, people have gone from identifying with a religion and practicing regularly – for many, until they came of age – to raising children who will not have a religious identity, and may have little to no cultural context for belief. Whether or not this shift is a crisis or a liberation is up for debate, but we would be remiss to ignore it. There’s more than a small chance that we may come to recognize the implications of what we have forfeited with little inquiry too late, much like the climate crisis.
Maria Kuznetsova: After five years in the Deep South, I have a new appreciation for how sports can become a religion of sorts in terms of the rituals, the community fervor, and the quasi-spiritual devotion around the sport – definitely one of the “secular gods” you mention. When you were writing about hockey, did you find yourself drawing on similar thematic frames you used in exploring religion, or did you go into it with a different mindset?
Anna Bruno: I grew up watching my brother play hockey, and I would let my kids play hockey. I was a big soccer player. There was a time in my life when sports were hugely important. I played year-round, sometimes on three teams at once. It’s crazy to think about now. Just the time commitment. The driving around to tournaments and camps. But it was healthy. All my friends played sports. Competing was fun.
Sports become problematic when people worship them. How much are we willing to sacrifice for hockey and football–and other contact sports? It’s a question. A debate. It’s not like people are going to stop playing these sports. We know about CTE. We analyze life expectancy for players in high-contact positions. The industries march on. For me, it’s an individual question more than anything. How many concussions are too many? How do I encourage my kids to develop themselves spiritually and intellectually, so when their sports careers inevitably end – because they end for everyone, even professionals – they have rich lives?
Maria Kuznetsova: That was what I loved about your book – you weren’t telling us what to think about Catholics or hockey players or people in Pittsburgh, but rather, just showing us that these people exist and have rich lives, and are worth learning about. It reminded me of the very real and serious work fiction can do, even if it’s hilarious – to connect us to our fellow human beings and ask questions, even when there are no answers.
Anna Bruno: I agree with a caveat–one thing that distinguishes mystery from literary fiction is that there is, in fact, an answer. The mystery must be solved by the end. A literary mystery offers readers the best of both worlds: they can engage with the characters and themes of the book on their own terms, while also experiencing the satisfaction of trying to figure out whodunit–and ultimately having their suspicion confirmed or upended. Perhaps this is the promise of all great genre fiction: both complexity and resolution.