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.

I'm KCRW, Santa Monica.

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm happy to have as my guest, Joanna Scott,

whose new novel, Follow Me, is being published by Little Brown.

In many ways, I think it's the most interested in character

and story of the novels you've done so far. It's a novel about a working-class woman, her daughter, and her granddaughter, and the

way in which life takes its shape for them and is shaped by them. The book is called Follow

Me, which might be what this kind of novel tells us.

Essentially, the novel we're talking about says, life is a river, and we follow along its banks,

and it leads us, it guides us through our lives.

Now, many writers, I'm thinking in particular, of Stanley Elkin, have pointed out that American novels are about events, climactic events involving water, whether it's Huckleberry Finn or Moby Dick.

And literally here, a woman is going back to the source of the river.

It's an invented river in this book called the Tuskee River, and it flows northward.

It seems to be an environment somewhere between Pennsylvania and upstate New York, and she is searching this river, but we notice as we read the book that Sally,

the woman who will come to be the grandmother, discovers in the river river fairies.

What do they called?

They're called the Tuskewale.

...