Pulitzer Winner Adam Johnson on Why a Novel "Had to Fragment"

By Elena Vasquez

Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Johnson appeared at The Center for Fiction in Downtown Brooklyn this fall to mark the release of his new novel, The Wayfinder. Amitav Ghosh, author of the Ibis Trilogy and the first English-language writer to win India's Jnanpith Award in 2018, moderated the conversation.

Johnson won the Pulitzer for The Orphan Master's Son. He also won the National Book Award and the Story Prize for Fortune Smiles. He teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco.

Why did the novel's shape have to change?

An audience member asked Johnson about moving stories from an oral tradition onto the page. Johnson called the shift "a strange translation" — and traced it to his interviews with North Korean defectors.

"I do believe that narrative is a meaning-making machine," Johnson said. He described that machine working across language, memory, emotion, chronology, causality and structure.

His first two books were autobiographical, he said. Then came fiction — and, with it, what he called the serious questions.

What did the defectors' stories reveal?

Johnson recalled meeting his first defector, a former orphan in North Korea, whose story arrived out of order, in fragments. The man wanted catharsis. But telling the story, Johnson said, reactivates the pain: "the meaning-making machine brings the pain back."

"How do you tell the story without your story re-hurting you?" Johnson asked. His answer, drawn from many conversations: "they told their stories in little pieces."

Johnson compared the pattern to a grandmother sharing fragments of the old country at each holiday, leaving listeners to assemble the whole.

He cited one man's account of crossing the Yellow River. The man told it in the first person plural — "we were scared," "we didn't know when to go" — until a stranger's daughter began to float away. The point of view collapsed into "I": the man put the girl on his back, lost her, and could not say who the father was. Johnson's conclusion: the teller had not yet understood that he himself had lived it.

What did that mean for The Orphan Master's Son?

Johnson said he knew the book "could never be like a 'beginning, middle, end' western sensibility."

"The book had to fragment," he said. "The book had to change point of view. It had to leave it to the reader to put the story together."

He acknowledged the cost. Fragmentation made the story less accessible, and readers asked him: "why did you mess it all up?" His defense was plain: "it just felt true to me."

Johnson taped a Post-it note to his monitor that read: forget the word novel. The word, he said, carries a tradition, conventions and a history. Name the book too early, he argued, and "it will never have a chance to become the closest thing it could be to the material that's informing it."

Who was on stage?

Johnson's honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship and a Holtzbrinck Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, born in South Dakota, he is also the author of Emporium and Parasites Like Us.

Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy comprises Sea of Popies — shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. His nonfiction includes The Great Derangement, The Nutmeg's Curse and Smoke and Ashes.

The Center for Fiction, a literary nonprofit, hosts events, reading groups and writing workshops from its Brooklyn home, which includes a bookstore, café, library and Writers Studio.

The exchange frames The Wayfinder's arrival with a working method: Johnson builds form from how witnesses actually speak — and leaves readers to do the assembling.