Q: So if we’ve seen this American capacity for self-judgment shift away from politicians, who have power, to artists, who are putatively marginalized, do you think this prophetic voice has a hope of affecting American reality at the level of politics and policy, not just the tone of its thought and self-image?

A: Nobody knows how cultural changes affect the way we think, what our desires are, what we’re afraid of, how we make choices whether private or public. I’m not pursuing this to say that three Philip Roth novels will somehow force America to look at itself in a real mirror and come to grips with its failings and possibilities, I'm not saying that at all. But I do think we all carry around notions in our head that are very unformed of what we think this country is and what we want it to be, and everything affects that. But certainly there’s no direct effect. A writer writes a book because he or she is fascinated by a subject and wants to follow it where it leads. One of the chapters in this book is called “Bill Pullman’s Face,” and it really is about the notion that in one actor’s face, over the course of several roles, you can see an enactment of the country using itself up and becoming a nihilist kingdom where nothing matters, where nothing anybody says makes any sense, where the betrayal has left that desert of the Old Testament. The prophet in my conception is a voice of judgment, as you were saying. I wanted to see if I could write an entire long chapter about this: here’s Bill Pullman, he’s a movie actor, a lot of his roles are boring and you confuse him with other actors because his looks are generic. I was fascinated by the notion that in a few roles you could see him judging the country as finished, empty, nothing left. I wanted to see if, as a writer, I could convince a reader to follow me along on that story. The motive for writing a book isn’t necessarily to make the world better, it’s to follow the material where it leads.

Q: Both Lynch and Roth are very taken up with the nature of identity. For Lynch it’s always this flickering, mutable thing that he seems to argue doesn’t exist in any quantifiable way. For Roth, it’s a binary, one thing on the surface, the opposite thing concealed. How did these two takes on identity dovetail to inform your idea of a unified American identity handed down across time?

A: I think there is an American identity handed down across time, but it’s not a single thing. It’s complex. What America is all about is that it promises every individual freedom to define and discover, but when you pursue your freedom you also betray your community because you leave it behind. In acting out the fact that you don’t need it and won’t obey or respect it, you are denying the whole that has given you this freedom. That paradox, that tension, is where I think American identity exists, if we want to set up something binary. I think it would be too facile to say it’s at war with itself, but in America, freedom, which is our birthright, is always accompanied by doubt and guilt. Refusing to seize freedom and only living within the suffocation of everyone else’s expectations, that’s a betrayal too, of your birthright to find out who you really are and what you really want. I think that is unique to this country. Every real society has a different sense of values and what’s most important, and I don’t think you find specifically that tension anywhere else. I mean of course you find it, but not as an identifying, fundamental element that ultimately everybody who is an American or wants to become one comes to grips with. When people say that people come to America because they want a better life, that always translates into “make more money.” Of course, that’s true in so many cases, but that’s not all that’s true, that’s not the only reason people come here. One reason so many people have come to the United States from Mexico over the past twenty years is that Mexico, over the past century has been a vicious, authoritarian, corrupt gangster-state, where to speak out, to try to form a labor union, to in any way go past a whole series of unwritten laws, could mean you’d end up dead, or with your livelihood taken away. So the people who are crossing the border, yeah, they want a “better life,” they want to make more money, but they also want to send their kids to better schools and grow up in a place where they can become whatever they want to become. All those clichés are driving people here.