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 Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. Today my guest is John

Burnham Schwartz. He has most recently written his third novel. It's called Claire Marvel.

It's published by Nantelisse at Doubleday.

And the previous books, both of them available in paperback, are Bicycle Days and Reservation Road.

Now, this book takes on a special task, which is to create the textures and moods of a difficult romance, a romance

unto death that follows its characters from their youth in graduate school at Harvard to their various unhappy fates. And I wanted to begin by asking,

since this is a book in which really nothing comes out the way the characters would have dreamed it.

You know, unhappiness is really its subject for all that the publisher might want to call it a romance,

or it's a romance in the sense that Keats means romance, infinite deferment and infinite loss.

Was there ever a point at which the book would have taken a happy direction?

Did you want a cheerful book at first?

I'll preface this by saying my mother's always asked me when I'm going to finally write a comedy.

This is a story of unrequited love, but it's also, I think, I think it's a book about a great passion.

How that passion manifests itself in life is the story of the book as told through these two people.

They're characters such as they are, are really what I wanted to explore, because how they fail to connect, sort of echoing the words of

Forster, but how they fail to connect in the permanent way that

we would all love them to connect and that we ourselves looking ahead hope that in our own lives

...