By Christine Rice

Rebecca Makkai’s short story collection, Music for Wartime, knocked me on my heels. The stories are stunningly well-crafted (and heartbreaking and subtle and profound and beautiful) but what really blew my mind was Makkai’s ability to capture the atomic energy of moment – that blink when a character’s world shimmers and explodes.

Throughout the collection, I would stop to linger on paragraphs like this:

In the early morning of December 1 the sun was finally warming them all, enough that they could walk faster. With his left hand, he adjusted the loop of steel that cuffed his right hand to the line of doomed men. He was starved, his wrist was thin, his body was cold: The cuff slipped off. In one breath he looked back to the man behind him and forward to the man limping ahead, and knew that neither saw his naked, red wrist; each saw only his own mother weeping in a kitchen, his own love on a bed in white sheets and sunlight.

Music for Wartime’s short stories often pair the absurd and poignant. They lay bare characters’ internal and external struggles in the context of some of the world’s most horrifying moments and, just like that, capture wars of the heart too.

Even now, months after finishing the collection, I find myself digging back into the stories to see what she did on the page, how she so deftly shifted a mood, how she made the magical ordinary and the ordinary magical.

Author of The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House and recently a finalist for the Midland Authors 2016 award (and a slew of other publications and awards), Rebecca fielded my questions ranging from short story vending machines to epigenetics to reality TV and, somewhere in there, we discussed Music for Wartime.

CR: There’s this lovely SWEET.COM piece about your experience with Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard To Find.” When I clicked on it, some algorithm summed me up and insisted that I read about a vending machine that spits out short stories. So I was wondering: What short stories would you like to see in a short story vending machine?

RM: I love this! I think they’d have to be short and punchy, with broad appeal. The kind of story that would win over new short story readers. (Why would a new short story reader buy a story from the machine? No idea. Let’s ignore that question.) Something like Kevin Brockmeier’s “The Ceiling” or Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” would be cool. When I want to grab my undergrads’ attention, I assign them Junot Diaz’s “Alma,” a funny, sad, raunchy story. But if we’re going to go classic, I’d choose John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio,” just because it is, after all, about getting messages from a mysterious machine.

CR:  You use the last few lines from Duane Niatum’s poem “Consulting an Elder Poet on an Anti-War Poem” as Music for Wartime’s epigraph.

Then why did you to the end,

live with the dark,

sing into your ruin?

I love that poem. I was wondering if it inspired certain stories in any way? Or did you come to his work later and found that this part of the poem fit the collection perfectly?

RM: The latter. This is going to sound terrible, and I wish I had a more organic story, but after I put the collection together I felt like there must be some poem out there, maybe something from the ancient Greeks, that tied together all my themes. Something that asked the same question the book asks, namely what it means to make music and art in the midst of a brutal, chaotic world. I thought there was going to be something perfect in the Aeneid, but all I found were passages about dismemberment. So I looked on the Poetry Foundation website (not just one of my favorite websites, by the way, but one of my best teaching tools as well) and typed “war” into the search box. I read a lot of poems before I found this one, and it instantly clicked. I hope people will go and read the whole poem, because the whole thing speaks even better to the collection than the excerpt, but I couldn’t very well stick a whole poem by someone else at the start of my book. I’m still so grateful that I was able to get permission to quote it.

CR: I’ve read “The Singing Women” over and over. The economy of language, the pulled-back storyteller’s voice, the horrifying context – all of it – just chilled me. For those readers who haven’t read this collection…many of the stories are set in Romania. Can you talk about your connection to that part of the world? I’m also wondering if you’d heard these fables/folktales – “The Singing Women,” “Other Brand of Poison (First Legend),” “Acolyte (Second Legend),” “A Bird In The House (Third Legend)” – from a family member or if they came to you in different ways?

RM: First, I ought to clear up the Romania issue. My family is Hungarian, (which is a distinct ethnicity, language, etc.), but they were from Transylvania, which is one of the parts of Hungary that was sliced off and given to Romania after World War I. Both of my grandparents left and raised my father in Budapest, but some relatives did stay in Transylvania and either escaped much later or are still there. “The Singing Women” and “The Worst You Ever Feel” are about Romania, but the Legends and the last story in the collection are all about Hungary (Budapest, Lake Balaton, and Hungarian expats in the States).

“The Singing Women” is based on a (very probably apocryphal) story about a real composer, Istvan Marta, the basics of which were told to me just a couple of years ago by the writer Brian Bouldrey. But the three Legends are indeed that – family stories I grew up with, ones I grappled with in writing for years before realizing that the only way I could tell them was to lay bare my own struggles, to admit freely that I’ve inherited these stories and can neither report them straight nor claim them as my own by fictionalizing them.

“The Briefcase,” although it takes place in an unnamed country, is actually based on family legend as well. The father of my father’s cousin was a university professor, and one day he was grabbed and dragged into a chain gang of passing prisoners when the count came up short, and never seen again. I had absolutely no way (and no right) to tell his story, so I told instead the story of the man who’d escaped the line of prisoners, the one who then saw someone grabbed to replace him and had to live with his guilt.

CR: I’m really curious about this new research investigating the phenomenon of memories passing between generations. So these huge and profound shifts, these traumatic events that effect so many people (like we are seeing, for example, in Syria and so many other places around the world) might influence people right down to their DNA. Can you talk a little bit about your family’s experience and how these traumatic experiences may have influenced what takes your attention as a writer?

RM: I’m fascinated by epigenetics. My father had polio that affected his left leg, and I walk with my left foot turned in for no good reason at all. I was attacked by a dog when I was ten, and both my daughters have an irrational fear of dogs. It makes a strange kind of sense.

My father escaped Hungary in 1956, following the failed Hungarian Revolution. And of course his childhood was chaotic and violent prior to that. Regardless of the genetics issue, I’ll just say that because of the war and the politics surrounding it, he wasn’t really parented. His father was in Gestapo prison and then communist prison, his mother was often in hiding, and when he wasn’t in children’s homes, he was raised by nannies or living with distant relatives in the hills. It’s always hard for a family to recover from a gap like that, and he didn’t really have a conventional conception of parenting, which in turn affected his relationship with me and my sister.

Oddly, I wrote most directly about escape and its trauma not in these stories about Hungary but in my first novel, The Borrower, which is entirely fiction. In that book, the protagonist, a children’s librarian, leaves town with the ten-year-old boy who’s run away to her for help. Her father is a Russian immigrant, and once she’s run away herself she needs to come to terms with his legacy. Obviously (I hope) the book isn’t autobiographical; I’ve never stolen a child. But I was definitely working through issues that obsess me, ones close to my heart. I’ll probably never be done unpacking what it means to be a first-generation American, but The Borrower is the most directly I’ll do it in fiction for a while.

CR: In Music for Wartime’s Acknowledgments, you write that, after having your first child, you felt like you could never ‘prioritize’ writing again. But the priorities shift, yes? Do you find that ‘priorities’ (like family and friends and experience) deepen the writing?

RM: What I really meant by that was that with a baby and a full-time job, I literally didn’t think I’d have time again to write, when writing was bringing in at most two hundred dollars a year. I was specifically talking about my first inclusion in The Best American Short Stories, which I found out about when my daughter was five months old, and which changed everything. When your first is that young, you can’t see how short the baby period really is. You feel like you’re going to have a baby for the rest of your life, not for less than a year. And with my career the way it was – a novel stalled in the middle, three stories published –spending hours and hours away from my baby to write just felt like it would be irrational and irresponsible. Of course that wouldn’t have lasted, even without BASS coming along. I was never going to be a person who could sit there not writing, and my kids were going to get bigger regardless. But it was how I was feeling when I got that email from BASS, and so it’s one of the many, many reasons I’m forever indebted to that anthology.

CR: This is your first collection of short stories. You wrote them over 13 years and many of them were published in journals. None of us write in a vacuum but you seem to have been blessed by wonderful mentors and editors. Can you talk about how these editors – those people behind the scenes – helped you become a stronger writer? Or one editor in particular who made a strong impression on you.

RM: I’ve had some wonderful experiences along the way, but actually very few editors of journals have the time to deeply edit a story. They have thousands of submissions, and they aren’t going to take something that isn’t pretty much exactly where they want it. (This isn’t to say my stories came out polished, just that the feedback I got on them came long before any journal editor ever saw them.) I don’t fault anyone for this –they’re taking a story because they already like it, and they’re busy – but I do always wish for more ass-kicking, not less. One notable exception is Rob Spillman of Tin House, who has vastly improved two of my stories (“Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart” and another one, “K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” which will be in my next collection) by pushing very hard at the core of the story, finding the places where I could take things farther.

CR: There are wars going on in all of these stories.

In the stories set in eastern Europe, there’s this pulled back sense (paired with wonderful close details) that this happened, and everyone there knew it happened, and it could happen again, and that people better pay attention (talking specifically about “The Singing Women,” “Other Brands of Poison (First Legend),” “Acolyte (Second Legend),” “A Bird In The House (Third Legend),” “Exposition,” “The Briefcase”).

I admire a lot of things about this collection and your writing but I especially love the way you weave brutality and magic and humor into your work (also in Hundred Year House). These stories have such wonderful depth. And although many of the stories are set in Europe or have characters who find themselves displaced and damaged, there are also stories like “The Miracle Years of Little Fork” and “Couple of Lovers on a Red Background” that investigate battles of the heart, more internal struggles.

How did you settle on the title Music for Wartime?

RM: The title was really what brought the collection together for me. Years ago, someone got me an introduction to an editor who agreed to read the collection I had at the time. (I think maybe four stories survived from that one to the final iteration.) She wisely turned the collection down, but in her note to me she remarked that maybe the stories could eventually cohere around one of the themes she’d noticed, namely music or war. Up till then I’d viewed these as ruts more than themes – and even then, I didn’t see the two themes working in concert. I don’t think the editor saw it, either.

Right after my first novel was published, I started thinking about the collection again, wondering if I could get this pile of stories to cohere. The title came to me as a way to combine those themes, and I liked that it sounded like an album title, something you’d find on the cover of an old LP in your grandparents’ house. Over time, it helped me to think about the central questions of the book, questions that had been hiding in plain sight all along.

I was worried about fitting the non-war, non-music stories in there, but when you come down to it, every solid short story is about both conflict and beauty. I’ve made fun of myself by saying that you could take basically any story in the world and stick it in there, and it would still fit the themes. I mean, I mentioned “The Enormous Radio” before. That would totally work! A radio plays music, and there’s all kinds of strife and conflict in that story.

But I’m exaggerating of course, and one of the reasons I know I am is there are stories we cut from the collection specifically because they didn’t fit, didn’t speak to the themes.

CR: Music is a lifeline for many of your characters. It often lifts them out of horrifying situations. Are you a musician?

RM: Well, I’m a semi-professional ukulele player…

No, not really. I wish. I grew up in a very musical household, and my sister is a musician. I played the piano and sang all the way through college, but that was always going to be the end of the road for me.

I’d argue that music isn’t always uplifting, in this collection. In two stories, “The Singing Women” and “Exposition,” it directly leads to people’s deaths. And in “Couple of Lovers on a Red Background,” it’s a complicated thing. This woman has either resurrected J. S. Bach or hallucinated him, and she’d having an affair with him in 2002 New York. Music has a messy role in that story, one I won’t splice here. (In “The November Story,” too, art is a complicated, commodified thing.) It was important to me that music not be reduced to that trope of “art saves us,” and that was something I kept in mind both as I wrote and as I assembled the stories for the collection. We’re so used to that message, though, that I think it’s been hard for readers to see what I actually wrote rather than what they expect to read.

That said, there are definitely some stories where art is salvation. “Good St. Anthony Come Around,” while it’s about visual art rather than music, is maybe the best example of this.

CR: “The November Story” is told from the point of view of a reality show producer. It’s such a funny story and I found myself thinking that this was probably very close to what happens on reality shows. What inspired this story? What research went into it?

RM: I love shows like Project Runway and Top Chef, ones that let me commiserate, after a long writing day, as people struggle with their work and failures and ambitions. But of course it’s not reality at all, and there are people controlling the story arc, and I’m obsessed with those people. I’m always watching two shows at once: the actual show, and the behind-the-scenes version that I’m making up. I wanted to write about the people on the other side of those talking head interviews, the ones asking the questions.

I couldn’t do much research at all, because everyone who works in reality TV signs a nondisclosure agreement for about three million dollars. So I just came up with the worst-case scenario and wrote it down. The story aired on This American Life in 2011, and afterwards I got a lot of notes from people in the industry telling me I’d basically gotten it right. Which was both gratifying and alarming.

CR: You teach too. In what ways does teaching influence your writing?

RM: Oof. You’re asking on a night when I’ve just caught a plagiarist and will be staying up quite late to grade instead of writing, so I’ll skip right over my first few cranky answers and go with something that’s equally true but occasionally harder to remember: Teaching forces me to articulate what I know, and to admit what I don’t.

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