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 Jonathan D., the author most recently of Palladio, which has been published by Doubleday.

He's the author as well of St. Famous, the Liberty Campaign, and The Lover of History.

Now, when I was reading Palladio, I was kind of amazed. It was the first book of D's that I had read,

and the interaction between character, structure, and idea seemed to me to be unusual and profound and very moving.

And I wanted in particular to begin to talk about these characters

because they seem, in a way, to be symptoms, victims of the culture that this book is criticizing.

They are people who in different ways radically don't connect and radically disconnect.

And I wondered if you find this kind of person typical nowadays.

Well, I don't know if I'd say symptomatic, more than typical. I don't know that I would

represent them as typical, but they do, I guess I'm drawn toward characters that in whom that

conflict between public and private speech is played out. Certainly the case here with John

and Molly, that they, in very different ways, they each become, internally know, internally, they're a kind of battlefield

on which a war between what I think of us different kinds of speech, you could say different

kinds of thinking or different kinds of interaction with the culture are played out.

Molly becomes sexualized so early in her teen years that she becomes enormously intuitive

about what men want from her, having nothing to do with the things they say, but she becomes

...