Bill: In Chasing the Sea you describe how Stalin artificially created countries by dividing Central Asia into Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajik, etc. Would it be accurate to say that the act of designating these territories as countries encouraged them to feel autonomous?
Tom: I try to address this a bit in the book. Historically speaking, these places never had national understandings of themselves, so when the Soviets came along and created these boundaries, I don't think a national consciousness happened right away. That took at least a generation. There were some Uzbek intellectuals who thought of themselves as belonging to a new nationality, but most of them were committed Communists, so there was no lunge for autonomy. Even when the Soviet Union was falling to pieces, all of the Central Asian states resisted breaking away.
Tom: No, not at all. I haven't had a religious bone in my body since I was at most 17. But I'm fascinated by religion and, yes, the religious, and I'd like to think my own (by now) pretty extensive reading into religious history and religious texts has given me some familiarity with the caves and crags of the deeply Christian brain. And I would say I'm empathetic to my Christian characters, but not at all sympathetic, as I've seen the missionary work they do in Central Asia tear too many families apart. But I do think the shock of first experiencing a place such as Uzbekistan translated, for me, into something like a religious crisis: the world you thought you knew and understood is torn away from you, and you're stuck howling in this strange new void. So that sense of loss and confusion is definitely transferable.
Bill: Did you ever write that essay, "Some Notes on an Abandoned Novel" that you mentioned to Robert Birnbaum when he interviewed you?
Tom: I never did, actually, and wound up incorporating a lot of my abandoned novel notes into the book proposal I wrote for my new book about the apostles, since the novel I abandoned was about one of the twelve apostles (John, in fact). But I think I'll be giving a lecture one of these years at Bennington (where I teach in the low-residency MFA program) about the necessity of giving up on projects at a certain point. I think people don't abandon things often enough. The world could be saved a good deal of mediocre books if people just scrapped them and started over again. The counter argument is a book like Franzen's The Corrections, which any sane person would have scrapped after the the five-year mark of struggling, but, as history now knows, he didn't--and thank god for that.
Bill: To what extent is the internet available in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and neighboring countries?
Tom: I haven't been to Central Asia since 2003, but back then there were plenty of Internet cafes that offered minimally censored web access, though in Uzbekistan at least I believe this access has been tightened considerably.
Bill: Reading Chasing the Sea reminded me that history seems to be one long, violent land-grab, right up to and including our present time. I was reading earlier today about Gene Roddenberry's dream of world peace. Do you think it's possible, or do countries simply pretend, for the sake of the media, that they want peace, when they really want to keep grabbing land?
Tom: Man, you're asking the wrong guy on this one. I think land is really no longer a motivating force for a lot of conflict in the last decades. Much of that has characterized war since, say, the 1970s has been mainly ideological. Will there ever be world peace? I have my doubts, but I do think the world will probably be a lot more peaceable someday, probably after some horrible conflagration that makes us all -- at least, those of us who are still alive -- sickened by the prospect of pressing a button capable of erasing an entire culture. Mechanized war is probably over, by and large. Ideological, terrorist-driven war--that seems to be what we and our children will face, and if we can't figure out a way to fight such wars without playing into the hands of the terrorists themselves, it will be a long, long century.
Loch Ness Memoir