Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,

Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,

from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works

by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes

for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice

and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with

two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now,

and in the third episode I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky. You can find a link in

the description or search close readings wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and I'm joined today by James Lazden to talk about serial killers and lead smelting plants in America's Pacific

Northwest and the ways in which they may be connected. James Lasden is a novelist poet and short

story writer. His next book, The Family Man, about the Murdoch murders in South Carolina,

will be published in 2006. His piece in the current issue of the LRB is a review of Murderland, Crime and Bloodlust in the

time of serial killers by Caroline Fraser, which argues that lead pollution may have played a larger

role in the making of many serial killers than has been previously

recognised, though she does, of course, acknowledge the importance of other factors too.

Hello, James, and thank you so much for talking with me today.

Hi, thanks so much for inviting me.

So serial killers were not unique to the Pacific Northwest and norwood lead smelting factories,

but Caroline Fraser's reason for focusing on that part of the

world and that time seems to be partly or even largely that she grew up there herself.

I mean, there's an element of memoir to this book.

There is, yes, that's definitely a part of it.

...