Adam Haslett
A stranger no more
Adam Haslett balances law school with explosive literary success
David Wiegand, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, September 21, 2002
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/09/21/DD222445.DTL&type=books



There probably aren't too many Elis running around New Haven these days who think of Yale Law School as a kind of career halfway house, but that's what Adam Haslett is doing in his final year of classes there. For three days of the week, he's focusing on criminal and appellate law at Yale. The rest of his time is spent back in his New York apartment, working on his first novel and, in essence, preparing for next year, when he will devote full time to an out-of-nowhere literary career that's made him one of the most talked about young writers of the year.

Tall and lanky, with a retreating hairline over a wide forehead, brown eyes and a sharply angular nose, Haslett, 31, is still a bit stunned at the reception his debut book of stories, "You Are Not a Stranger Here" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), has received since its publication this summer. Not only has the book drawn critical raves, it was also recently chosen by author Jonathan Franzen ("The Corrections") as the second selection in the NBC "Today" show's fledgling on-air book club. So far, there are 100,000 copies in print, a fairly amazing number for a first book of stories by a virtual unknown.

The nine stories in the book represent an unusual breadth of human experience, much of it at least initially disturbing: A man travels to England with his wife with the idea of committing suicide and meets an old woman who

is tending to a dying youth in a room that reeks of the ointment she spreads on the boy's ravaged body to ease his pain; a psychiatrist believes that he can help a woman whose now-dead son severed the fingers of one of her hands during a crystal meth binge; a teenage boy invites repeated physical and sexual brutalization by a school bully in order to unleash his repressed grief over his mother's suicide.

While some might simplistically call the stories sad or depressing, Haslett isn't defensive when he disagrees.

"I don't find them sad at all because for me the saddest thing is compulsory happiness, the notion that a happy ending is something we have to have," he says, sitting in the window seat of a Noe Valley Starbucks earlier this week. "I don't think stories have to have happy endings in order to be stories that contain a kind of redemptive quality."

While Haslett's stories may not fit the Aristotelian definition of comedy, their characters all undergo some kind of transformation, usually through contact with others who, often unwittingly, enable a kind of benedictive catharsis. The teenage boy is finally able to grieve; the suicidal man, whose wife is constantly afraid of leaving him alone for fear of what he'll do, finds solace in the company of the dying boy whose time is also growing short; the shrink reaches a new understanding of his own pain once he accepts the lonely mother's resolve to live with the loss of her son because it is now and forever a part of who she is.

"Depression is really like a total lack of emotion in a way, and I feel that if anything it's the opposite of depression or numbness that is the definition of true sadness," he says. "These people are flooded with feeling."

Haslett, the youngest of three children, was born in Kingston, Mass., to a businessman and a schoolteacher. His brother is a music journalist living in Cambridge, Mass., and his sister, with whom he stayed during his Bay Area book tour, is a documentary filmmaker at Stanford. During the equivalent of his junior high years, Haslett and his family lived in England, where his father was born.

"I was just a kid, then," he says. "At first I didn't want to go, and once I got there, I didn't want to leave. I did the whole British prep school thing,

with the shorts and the tie."

He still returns to the Scottish Highlands, where his stepfather lives, and several of his stories are convincingly set in England.

Haslett began writing fiction as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, where he happened to take one seminar with Franzen. After college, he found himself trying to choose between writing and what he calls "a reliable life" in a solid profession, such as law. He was able to defer Yale while he studied at the Iowa Writers and the Provincetown Fine Arts Workshops. Today, he says, "it's still an open question" as to whether he'll ever practice law, now that he's making a name for himself as a writer.

Following its English sojourn, Haslett's family returned to upscale Wellesley, Mass., where his widowed mother still lives.

And now her handsome, single, gay son is the literary toast of the town and finishing his law studies at Yale. On the surface, Haslett's is an enviable life. One might even go so far as saying his has been a life of privilege and opportunity.

But a suggestion of something else begins, haltingly, to emerge when he is asked about his late father, who suffered from manic depression.

"It definitely impacted the family. It was a formative experience," he says,

adding that "there were times when he got to a point where he couldn't work."

He struggles for the right words for a second, admitting that he's never really talked much about his father's illness before.

"He was in psychiatric care. He wasn't necessarily always wanting to be in the care."

Although mental illness figures in some of Haslett's work, "there's nothing really literal [from his past] in the stories."

"I feel more liberated as a writer when I find things that are 45 degrees off to the side [of his own life], so that some of my experiences flow into them and shape them.

"I feel lucky to be able to write. It's the only thing I've ever done that sort of integrates the past with what happens in the present, and what could happen in the future. There aren't many activities in life that can do all of those things, and writing is one of them. So when it goes well it feels like a privilege."

If so, it's a privilege Adam Haslett has clearly earned.

E-mail David Wiegand at dwiegand@sfchronicle.com.

©2002 San Francisco Chronicl