Q: Many authors don’t seem to enjoy book tours. For example, I just read in Harper’s––it’s too bizarre to be true, but here it is––that Margaret Atwood invented an autograph signing robot to send out on book tours. I wonder if, as a writer whose subject is the breadth of American culture, you find more enjoyment or creative fertility in book tours?

A: Well, I don’t believe that story for a minute. I wouldn’t go to see the Margaret Atwood robot myself. Book tours are very wearing, that’s why authors don’t like them. You have to get up early and go to bed late, you often eat lousy food or drink too much. You’re constantly traveling, you miss connections. But mainly, you have to be on all the time, you have to be funny or smart or have answers to questions. You may end up doing a lot of 6 a.m. local TV shows. It’s hard work. The other thing is that even if you’re a celebrity author, which I’m certainly not, you never know what’s going to happen. I remember Luc Sante once called me from somewhere in Iowa and said, “Can you explain to me why my publisher is spending money to send me to a book store in Iowa to read to three people?” One day, I walked down the street from my house in Berkeley, and there was a dumpy little bookstore, and there was an author sitting in the front window with a table in front of him and a big pile of books. He looked really unhappy, because nobody was there to see him or get an autograph. He looked familiar, and I realized it was Robert Parker, someone who for twenty years has had every one of his books go instantly on the bestseller list. The most popular mystery writer in the country maybe, and nobody showed up for him. So there’s always that worry. And you may just do a bad job, you may have a big crowd and do a bad job and leave people dispirited.

Q: Why do you think publishers continue to fund book tours in the face of all this apathy and adversity?

A: I read recently that publishers were backing off from book tours because they don’t make economic sense. The purpose of a book tour, unless you’re a very famous author or someone with a real cult, who’s going to attract 500 people to the store, and you’re going to sell 500 copies of the book and sign 500 more, isn’t to do a reading and sign books. The publisher makes no money on that. It’s to go on tour and do newspaper interviews, television, radio, stuff like that, and get people talking about your book. The fact is that one appearance on Fresh Air or one of the late night talk shows, let alone the heaven of all book promotion, Oprah, will do more than a thousand book tours.

Q: Can you describe for our readers the themes and impetus behind your new book, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice?

A: I have been fascinated with the idea of prophecy as the bedrock of American rhetoric. It’s a theme that comes up again and again when people ask what it means to be American, whenever there’s an attempt to say that this country is something whole, not just a collection of different states and ethnic groups. It’s not Iraq, it’s not Yugoslavia, it really is a place. I have always known that the voices of the Old Testament prophets––Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos, the prophets who said to the children of Israel, “You’ve betrayed your covenant with god and ruin is going to be your fate, and your cities are going to fall to dust, and it will be as if your pastures were seeded with salt, unless you change your ways…”––that voice accusing the people or a whole society of betraying its promise is central to our understanding of who we are. In the most desperate moments that theme comes up again, whether it’s with Lincoln or Martin Luther King Jr. or Allen Ginsberg in the middle of the Vietnam War. But it also seems to me that you can find people seeking this voice, trying to get their hands on it. How do you speak in this voice, how do you act out what it says? You find that all over, in novels, music, movies. When I taught the course that this book grew out of, one of the things I did was to use three different versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I really thought that movie captured the theme. You saw an entire society being dissolved, and behind it there was a sense that there was a reason for this. Nobody knows what it is, but nobody’s totally surprised. And I also found that in the nineteenth-century, American politicians up through Lincoln spoke in this voice all the time: William Lloyd Garrison, the great abolitionist publisher, did, Frederick Douglass did, John Brown did, people who pursued this notion that America is a society that makes promises that are so great that betrayal is inevitable, and coming to terms with that betrayal, recognizing it, becomes the engine that causes us to fulfill those promises. Because America is a society where people made a covenant with themselves, not with god. In our time, you find this voice in art, in culture. You don’t hear this in a serious way from political figures today, even religious figures. That’s why the book has the frame of classical American speeches and the heart of it is David Lynch, Philip Roth, the band Pere Ubu, Allen Ginsberg.