Q & A: Sara Paretsky

Sara Paretsky's new book is not a V.I. Warshawski mystery—she's written 12 since 1982. (And since she founded Sisters in Crime in 1986, she and her cohorts now make up half of all crime authors.) In Writing in an Age of Silence (LJ 4/1/07), Paretsky herself serves as the first-person narrator confronting moral failures and the evils of violence and repression. In five essays based upon her lectures of recent years, she explores a writer's challenges and responsibilities in this "age of silence."

"First, can you elaborate on your title?

It's odd to call these modern times an age of silence, when the clamor is deafening; cellphones, YouTube, Fox, American Idol. But it's an age of silence for the honest, real speech that we need, and it's getting harder and harder to find a way to hear such speech. The title also resonates with my own long journey from silence to speech.

Can you explain?

Since the passage of the Patriot Act I'd been concerned about its effect on readers, writers, and libraries and had spoken about it at the Illinois and Virginia State Library Association meetings. When I was asked to speak at the Toledo Public Library's author series in March 2003, I planned to talk on that topic. The library was getting cancellations because my proposed remarks were too political, and they asked me to change my speech. The library felt criticism of the Administration was an insult to local families who had relatives in the service.

Confrontation scares me; I was afraid of upsetting the library's sponsors, and I worried about facing a hostile audience. At the same time, I was talking about issues of censorship and silence, and I felt this was a true test of my principles. When I was done, they gave me a standing ovation, and their response empowered me. Many people said that the Administration's campaign to deride and marginalize all opposition was so effective that they had felt as if they were the only person in America to doubt what we were being told on Fox and CNN and by the White House. It made me realize how essential it is to speak in an age of silence before the silence drowns everyone. That day there was an antiwar march in Chicago, almost 100,000 people, but their numbers were not reported, and the coverage was an inside paragraph in the Chicago papers and equally limited TV coverage.

In "The iPod and Sam Spade," you write about the iconic loner heroes of classic American detective fiction and American Westerns. Then you turn to real life.

George Bush stood at Ground Zero after 9/11 and proclaimed the creed of the Old West as his response to bin Laden: "Wanted dead or alive." The mythology of the Old West, the self-sufficient loner, the hero who saves the town and rides into the sunset—it's an important part of how many Americans define themselves. That is not our only heroic model, but the current Administration seems to rely on it. To an outside observer, the President seems to think he himself is Shane, a Lone Ranger, or even Sam Spade. And the President is influenced by the work of Oswald Chambers, who wrote inspirational tracts with a Social Darwinian bent in the first decade of the 20th century. It was Social Darwinists—not Darwin—who proclaimed the phrase "the survival of the fittest." In essence, our government's policies are directed by a century-old text that says the poor lose out because they're unfit to survive and therefore it is pointless to try to help them.

Do you feel the responsibilities of libraries change in a time of crisis?

Libraries are playing an extraordinary role in today's crisis of civil liberties. I am awed by the courage of librarians. The Patriot Act threatens serious reprisals against them if they reveal having received either a subpoena or a National Securitiy Letter. Instead of retreating in fear, libraries all over the country began designing policies to protect patron's privacy. It took extraodinary courage for that Connecticut-based consortium of public and academic libraries to seek counsel and win a federal ruling that NSL perpetual gag orders are unconstitutional. These and other heroic acts should be more widely publicized so that Americans understand both the threat to their liberties and the courage that ordinary—yet extraordinary—citizens are diplaying.

You write that today's events defy your ability "to turn them into stories." What does that mean for your writing?

For me, the biggest challenge is to pare back. Instead of trying to solve every problem in the world in one gigantic unreadable novel, I need to think about the small, local story that illuminates the big one.