Both of your novels, Paradise, New York (1998) and Breaking and Entering (2012), are very much embedded in a particular place at a specific time, the Catskill Borscht Belt during its last gasp and small-town Michigan in the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. How do you balance the political, cultural and sociological issues invoked by these settings against the novel’s demands for plot and character development?

For me, setting is never divorced from character or plot. I don’t think of plot and character development as separate from the political, cultural or sociological forces that would be shaping a novel or story. Basically, when I create a character, I’m thinking of the world in which that person is at home, an insider, someone who belongs. What are the rituals that make up that character’s daily life? What does she wear? Eat? Watch on TV? Does he use slang? Profanity? Contractions? Wear a chai around his neck, or a WWJD bracelet around his wrist? Of course, most of us inhabit many worlds — we’re insiders, or insider/outsiders, in many communities and cultures. But for the purposes of a given short story or novel, I’m usually focusing on one particular world for each character. The conflict/plot then comes from something that acts to disrupt the main character’s equilibrium in his or her world.

So in your work?

In Paradise, New York, Lucy is an insider in the world of the Catskills, but that world is literally crumbling around her. How will she react? In Breaking and Entering, a family of outsiders, the Shapiros, move into a community that doesn’t share their religious or political beliefs (and vice versa), and their arrival sets off a chain of mutual paranoia. In such cases, when someone’s world is disrupted, the underlying values hidden by the choices that person makes in an unthinking way on a day to day basis become exposed, called into question. That’s what interests me thematically. I’m also interested in the way people can be insiders in worlds where we wouldn’t ordinarily think they would be found. I’m also interested in the way people can be insiders in worlds where we wouldn’t ordinarily think they would be found. Mr. Jefferson is an insider in the world of Catskill hotels — and Jewish theology — even though he’s an African-American handyman, which in fact was true of many nonJews I knew growing up in the Catskills. And in the conservative Christian world of western Michigan, we have Em, who is a Wiccan, and Matt Banks, who very much thinks for himself and whose good-heartedness transcends such easy classifications. Richard desperately longs to test his survival skills in the woods with the militia guys because he grew up hearing his father’s and uncle’s tales of surviving the Nazis in the woods of Poland. So these matters of politics/history/sociology/religion aren’t at all divorced from character and plot; they’re intimately intertwined.

The insider-outsider dichotomy might be interesting to apply to readers. For instance, I read as an outsider, albeit an interested one, in Paradise, New York, even though I actually vacationed at that other hotel which will remain unnamed. But because of the important issues raised in Breaking and Entering that spill far beyond the Michigan borders, I feel like an insider despite never having been there. Is there any way to comment on that?

No matter what I write, I think about my audience — who’s going to feel like an insider, who’s going to feel like an outsider, how the reader might react…

No matter what I write, I think about my audience – who’s going to feel like an insider, who’s going to feel like an outsider, how the reader might react to not knowing this world, how the reader might react to knowing this world as well as I do, or even better. When I wrote Paradise, New York, I thought that anyone who had grown up in an insular religious or cultural or ethnic world would understand the questions I was trying to explore. In a way, I was writing about identity politics; I was trying to ask why people need to identify themselves according to difference rather than similarity. But I underestimated the extent to which some readers would find themselves distanced by my references to Jewish culture and religion. By the time I wrote Breaking and Entering, I wanted to write for a more general audience. I was stunned to realize that readers on both coasts had no idea what I was talking about. It took quite a few years for the novel to find a publisher. But then everyone started talking about Red States and Blue States, and Tea Parties and Militias, and Evangelical Christians and creationists in the schools, and even people in Manhattan started to get what the book was about, so it finally found a home.

And I hope there was no value judgment implied in my saying how I positioned myself in either book. The various glimpses Paradise, New York provided into Jewish culture and religion in a narrowly identified time and place were welcoming, rather than distancing to me, whereas I felt uncomfortably immersed in the issues of Breaking and Entering. Toward the book’s end, Louise thinks, “Mutual paranoia can be the deadliest risk of all” — I’m interested in the technical choices you made to contain all this material, specifically point of view.

All I can say is that I initially wrote Breaking and Entering in multiple points of view. Louise’s chapters were in first person and the chapters from Richard’s and Molly’s and Matt’s and Ames’s points of view were written in third person. The chapters just came to me that way. But at some point I realized that was a clumsy way to write the book, so I recast all the chapters in third person past tense. By the time the novel was published years later, I was afraid that people were going to wonder why the narrator didn’t seem more cognizant of other instances of domestic terrorism, the Tea Party, 9/11, etc. I wanted to recreate Louise’s uncertainty at the time — as you say, her paranoia. So I recast the entire novel in present tense.

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.