Hearby Monsters is a podcast about facing the unknown. I, uh, I start to float, float away from the earth. Have you ever smoked crack before? We're all kind of frantically searching for meaning. They have the neurotransmitters. I think we're all jugglers in some way. Yo, we're not broken. Crazy delinquents. We're in our last day, young man. Listen to Hear Be Monsters.

The podcast about the unknown.

On the KCRW iTunes page.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannon Foundation.

Boots.

Well, we're thinking without a Lannin Foundation. Boots. Where would we be without boos? Where would we be without good?

No, Timber.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Christopher Sorrentino. He's the author of the novel The Fugitives, recently published by Simon & Schuster. To my mind, it was a fascinating novel

because it was so many kinds of novels at once. It was a true crime story as narrated by a

journalist, a novel of over-the-top emotion as told by a sensitive writer,

a novel involving folk tales, Indian folk tales,

as told by a man who might possibly not be an Indian and might not exist at all.

And the tones of voice throughout the book make four different kinds of novels so that by

the end of the book, there's a resolution.

But while we're reading, we're involved in a novel that's going deeply into the mind of

each of the major characters, yeah?

Yeah, there's definitely an emphasis on interiority, most obviously with the first narrator of the book, or I should say the second, the first being our Native American folktale storyteller.

But the dominating perspective is from Sandy Mulligan, my sensitive writer,

and its subjectivity is something that I was trying for the first time.

I'd never really written in any sustained way in a first-person voice,

...