Anna Shapiro’s third novel and fourth book, Living on Air, was published in May 2006 by Soho Press; the paperback came out in 2007. Kirkus Reviews said, “Shapiro’s portrait of Maude is knife-sharp; she completely inhabits the consuming inner world of a painfully intelligent adolescent girl, showing Maude’s every mood, thought and desire with piercing clarity” and called it “Bracing and raw.” The New York Times Book Review said that “Because it’s a story about art, it’s also a story about ego–the selfish monstrosity that can turn colleagues into competitors and family members into foes, the touchy cornerstone of identity, the inner force that helps us come to an awareness of who we really are.” Bust magazine says, “everything feels real . . . Despite everyone beating up on her, we want to be elegant, sophisticated Maude.” Newsday described it as “witty” and “elegant,” “among the genre’s best, a dazzling exposition of ambition and disdain, envy and insularity . . . Shapiro can bring even the inconsequential into telling relief . . . Always, it is Anna Shapiro’s perfect balance, the knowledge and sharp sympathy that pervade her dialogue and description, that makes Living on Air such a piercing joy.”

The Crocker Art Museum Store and Book Club chose Living on Air to read and to discuss with me in a conference call. It was a rare pleasure to be asked questions about the relations between art, life, and my book by 15 or so intelligent, cultivated, careful readers. I wish I could have met them in person (they were in California; I was in New York). You send words out into the void. Lo and behold: an answer comes. It’s very nice to get a good review, even better to get a great one, but most wonderful to know your words have moved someone.

I’ve been working for a while on a new novel, now nearing its finish. I don’t think I am the best synopsizer (how’s that for a word) of my own work, but here’s a shot:

YOUR OWN PEOPLE

When mid-forties-ish Tansy Gold connects with a bounding, handsome, successful widowed Englishman, it seems like everybody’s fairy tale come true. The trouble is, Tansy isn’t sure if it’s her happy ending, particularly when she has to move from her beloved if ramshackle Vermont farm to London to be with him—and live with his very young children, traumatized by their mother’s death. She doesn’t just have to struggle with them and their ill-wishing relatives, but a whole culture and terrain seemingly engineered to isolate and thwart her. She is clearsightedly ironic about it all, as she has come to be about her own painful early life—in which she nevertheless found a beauty that remains what matters most to her. But her childhood mistreatment leads her to distrust her own desires: is she finding married life hard because she’s damaged—or because this marriage would be hard for anybody? Is she a masochist if she stays—or if she goes? Is she there to prove herself to friends back home? Or is it just that she can’t admit failure? Meanwhile, there are the claims of those around her, a mourning father and children clamoring for emotional rescue. Trying to get through to them is a daily tangle of strategy and explosions as she ponders bailing out—possibly for a lifetime of regret— or staying, possibly for a lifetime of regret.