All cities have their secrets, but none are so dark as San Francisco's, the city that Ambrose Bierce famously described as "a point upon a map of fog." With its reputation as a shadowy land of easy vice and hard virtue, San Francisco provided the ideal setting for many of the greatest film noirs, from classics like The Maltese Falcon and Dark Passage to obscure treasures like Woman on the Run and D.O.A., and neo-noirs like Point Blank and The Conversation. In this guide to more than forty film noirs and the locations where they were shot, readers visit the Mission Dolores cemetery, where James Stewart spies Kim Novak visiting Carlotta’s grave in Vertigo; the Steinhart Aquarium, where Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth rendezvous in The Lady from Shanghai; and Kezar Stadium, where Clint Eastwood, in Dirty Harry, captures the serial killer, Scorpio, in a blaze of ghastly white light.
Q&A WITH NATHANIEL RICH
Q: You've said that The Mayor's Tongue is extremely personal but not autobiographical. How so?
None of the events depicted in the book are real, except perhaps for moments in which a male character humiliates himself by being inarticulate in front of a woman. None of the characters are stand-ins for me, and none of them--with the exception of one or two very minor characters--are based on any people I know in real life. But the book's emotions are very real to me, the themes and ideas are ones that I have thought about obsessively, and the spirit and the tone of the writing feels very much a reflection of my own sensibility. I felt like I funneled all of my own personal thoughts into some crazy contraption and, sausage-machine-style, out came The Mayor's Tongue.
Q: The failure of language is a central preoccupation of your novel. How do you develop that theme?
The main characters all want urgently to communicate their thoughts and emotions, but for different reasons, are unable to do so. They develop all kinds of strategies, some of them preposterous, but whether or not they succeed is open to interpretation. I think this is something we all struggle with; at least I do.
Q: There are two main stories that flow side by side in your novel, but never actually intersect. Why did you use this structure?
I had hoped that the two stories would generate some (perhaps unconventional) suspense as they unfold, that the reader wouldn't be able to help but wonder what the two stories were going to do. Even if that suspense is spoiled (by an interviewer's leading question, for instance), the fact is the characters in both stories are faced with similar problems but they approach them from their own perspectives, and reach different conclusions. My hope is that the two stories reflect and echo each other in different ways, and I felt that if they were to intersect, it would cheapen that dialogue. I think that, by the end, the stories feel resolved in a way that is true to the spirit of the novel.
Q: Your novel blends elements from many genres, including fantasy, realism, mystery, fable, melodrama, and romance, for starters. How do you describe the result?
I never thought in terms of genre, maybe because I don't have much experience in reading genre fiction, except for horror. I worked hard to make the characters human, vivid, and honest. It was important to me that the story move along at a steady pace (this required a good amount of cutting and condensing over the course of the writing process). I knew I wanted to explore certain themes, so I concentrated on making those as nuanced and involved as I could. I also knew from the very beginning of the project that there would be some slightly fantastical elements, but I wanted to work up to them gradually, so that the reader was never jarred by some sudden plunge into the surreal. I was thinking of a frog in slowly boiling water.
Q: You chose one of Italy's least-known regions, the Carso, as the setting for most of your book. Why?
The most prosaic reason is that I was living in Trieste the summer I started writing the book. That summer, Trieste hosted the annual international Esperanto festival, so everyone was walking around speaking this invented language. And this in a city where people speak a smattering of different tongues--Italian, German, Slovenian, and Hungarian primarily, but also Triestino, a thick dialect incomprehensible to other Italians. When you go up into the Carso, this odd web of languages and cultures becomes even more pronounced. On the winding mountain roads it's often difficult to tell what country you're in. The signs are all in different languages.
I also loved the idea of this isolated land that nevertheless is located within the borders of one of the most visited and familiar countries in the world. The region is completely forgotten by time, and even by its own country--I remember reading a survey in which the majority of Italians thought that Trieste wasn't even part of Italy. It was only annexed in 1954, and over history it has had numerous national and cultural identities, having been under the rule of the Romans, Byzantines, Slavs, the Austria-Hungarians; for several years after armistice it was even an independent territory. It is the gateway to the East, the easternmost city in Western Europe--but it also could be considered the westernmost city in the East. As Jan Morris wrote, it's "nowhere."
Q: Who are some of the writers who have influenced your work?
I wonder whether there are any writers I love whom I haven't tried to steal from. Some of the writers whose work I repeatedly consulted during the writing of the book were: Flann O'Brien, Mikhail Bulgakov, Charles Dickens, Italo Svevo, Stephen King, Kazuo Ishiguro, Katherine Dunn, and Arrian's history of Alexander the Great (one of many models for the character of Constance Eakins). Jan Morris's excellent Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere was an invaluable resource, for her depiction of the city and its peculiar hazy identity.
Q: Are you working on another book yet? Can you say anything about it?
I am. It's about a bizarre apocalyptic event. Like The Mayor's Tongue, the story begins in New York City, and then moves out into the countryside. There--I've already said more than I did in the five years it took me to write the first one.
