It was very effective the way you delayed having Matt speak for himself until almost the end of the book. In fact, I was struck throughout by how little each character knew and understood the other characters. Is this the book’s central theme or driving force?

When I moved to Michigan, I was struck to discover that people who hold such radically different world-views occupy the same state, the same city, the same neighborhood. Each side sees the other side as strange, alien, perhaps even dangerous. I started to wonder whether the mutual paranoia was justified. How could people so different from one another form the citizenry of a functioning democracy? So yes, the chapters are structured to explore these questions. Also, I needed most of the novel to understand Matt well enough to write a chapter from his perspective!

In service of promoting tolerance?

I wouldn’t say that tolerance per se is the novel’s theme. I think it’s pretty obvious that people should be tolerant toward other human beings. What’s less obvious is how we’re supposed to achieve such tolerance. When I write, I write to explore questions that puzzle me. What puzzles me here is how we can be tolerant of people if their world views are completely different from our own. If you believe that God exists and that He created the world in six days and that He decreed homosexuality to be sinful, and if I don’t believe that a personal god exists, if I believe the physical universe and all living beings in it evolved on their own, according to the laws of science, and if I believe that no form of consensual sex is sinful, how do we form a community? A state? A nation?

Speaking of sex, you write powerfully and frequently about sexual passion, sometimes describing it in religious language. Do you see sexual passion as holy?

Well, sexual passion is certainly one of the sacraments, one of the ways in which we both partake of the animal world and transcend it. But I’m also interested in the ways in which passions of all kinds can provide us with reasons to live… and yet at some point those same passions can turn destructive. The characters in Breaking and Entering are passionate about religion, politics, family, and yes, love and sex. When are those passions divine? When are they crazy? Destructive? That’s mostly what’s going on in those chapters in which Louise tries to figure out what she’s feeling with Ames.

Protecting the innocent is a central moral value of your work, is it not?

I never thought of it that way before. Maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s why I’ve always felt connected to the late Andre Dubus, who came at that theme from a Catholic perspective. In Breaking and Entering, I’m looking at the ways in which human beings crave both independence and someone to take care of them.

Despite the use of religious imagery and language, faith and hope do not come easily. I’m thinking of the poignant scene when Louise tries to reassure her daughter, Molly. In the absence of certain knowledge that a loving God exists, Louise tells her daughter to hope for someone “to hold you in their arms and say they love you and help you get through the night.” Can this be read as thematic?

All I’ll say about that scene is that it was inspired by something very similar that happened when my son was about seven and woke up in the middle of the night in terror because he realized that the universe doesn’t much care about anything that we do or don’t do, or whom we love or don’t love. Luckily, I had bought him a Beanie Baby a few weeks earlier and was able to comfort him in much the same way that Louise comforts Molly. Which is to say, not at all.