Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm here with Adam Hazlett, the author most recently of Union Atlantic.

It's published by Doubleday from the Nane-Tales imprint. He's the author

as well of a book of short stories. You are not a stranger here. Now, Union Atlantic has been,

it's been being called the first book of the post-economic crisis.

I'm here to say that, you know, it really isn't, nor does it seem to be the author's intention

to, but to instead take some of the moral climate of America, the climate that is the

aftermath of an economic crisis and examine it the way a novel can.

You would have to be Tolstoy to write the book of the economic climate.

It seems to me that like many novelists, you're writing about five or six people in a world

that exists, yes?

Yeah, no.

I mean, the ambition was to try to do something that I think novels are uniquely suited to do, which is to try to grapple with some, the relation between sort of macro forces of these sort of abstract powers that are represented by the Fed and the other large institutions and people's daily

lives and some way to get both of those into the frame.

So naturally, you embody them, embody those, that story in particular characters, which is where I start always

with the characters. And it took a long time before I happened upon the story that they

came eventually to be into.

...