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 Michael Frane, the author most recently of the novel Spies, published by Metropolitan Books.

He's the author, of course, of Copenhagen

and Noises Off among his plays.

The recent fiction has included headlong,

Now You Know, a Landing on the Sun, The Trick of It.

I'm very fond of his work,

and it's a pleasure to see you again.

The new novel finds an old man revisiting the site of his childhood

and making a projective act of imagination to try and recreate the conditions of confusion,

bewilderment, unknowingness that allowed him to believe

that his childhood's friend's mother was a German spy. The two boys have participated in all kinds of

imaginative scenarios.

And so for this older man to reinvent what he didn't know he knew, his confusions,

is an enormous act of imagination, especially since he comes to understand, as does the reader by the end of the book,

that his life has involved truths very different from the fabrications that the two boys involved themselves in. So what we experience very

peculiarly is a stereoscopic life, but we don't know it until the end of the book.

...