You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed, for you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblad, and today my guest is Valerie Martin, the author most recently of the Great Divorce, the author as well of Mary Riley, going backwards, a recent martyr,

a book of short stories, The Consolation of Nature, and Two Earlier novels, Alexandra and Set in Motion.

And I've got them all in front of me because I've been reading Valerie Martin since her first book came out, and I was in college.

Now, I thought I'd begin by asking, in Mary Riley, in which a serving girl is telling about the goings-on in the House laboratory of Dr. Jekyll, also known as Mr. Hyde, and in the great divorce in which there's a sort of lichenthropic set of transformations, that the neurosis had a known

literary objective correlative. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the case of Mary Riley,

voodoo, lycanthropy, metamorphosis in the case of the great divorce, whereas the earlier books seem to

be without a literary subtext. They seem much more hauntingly inaccessible in terms of finding the

place they come from. I think that's probably true in a way place they come from?

I think that's probably true, in a way, they do come more from a kind of personal mythology that is probably entirely peculiar to me, and it's unrelated to anything literary.

And I guess Mary Riley was the first novel I wrote in which I was openly and seriously

addressing the tradition of a novel.

Although the stories in consolation of nature are almost all studies of other stories.

The story called DeFries is modeled after James Joyce's The Dead.

A woman goes to a party and has an encounter with death.

There's one, in fact, that it's a direct quote from Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown,

a story of the woman who meets a wolfman at a party.

Well, there's a wolfman.

There's one.

Is sea lovers a...

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