This week’s story, “The New Coast,” takes place in a country recovering from war and is about two brothers who have moved into a shantytown in a small city that is gradually rebuilding. When did that scenario come to you?
I was in the middle of working on a novel called “Etna,” which is coming out next summer—it’s about a dog traversing a fictional country recovering from war. There’s a part where the dog spends some time in a city, and I have this moment where he looks across a river and sees many people in a shantytown. But the dog’s path doesn’t end up there, not for long; yet I kept thinking of who those people were on the riverbank, and that was how this story, and the brothers, came to me. I wanted to bring that corner of this imagined city alive, to stay in this universe a bit longer, even if the dog has moved on.
The story is told from the perspective of the younger brother. His older brother finds a job as a census-taker of sorts, surveying the population of the city. One night, he hears his brother calling out names as he dreams, but, over all, it seems as though the narrator’s brother shields him from what he learns. Is that the case?
Yes, I think that’s true. But I also think that this is the moment the younger brother understands that they have, in some ways, been living separate lives in the city. It’s as if they’ve become their own islands, with their own stories and timelines and collections of experiences and memories, and it makes one wonder, I hope, whether they were always a bit this way, each on their own path, even if they were always together, surviving together, before they came to the city.
There’s an older woman, Mrs. S, who helps the brothers settle in. How important is she in providing some kind of stability at a time when so much seems to be in flux?
It’s tricky: I think the brothers really crave other humans they can trust and rely on and feel safe around—as anchors in their lives—but, at the same time, they’re aware that such anchors aren’t real for them. They know that any minute their relatively stable life with Mrs. S could collapse. But rather than be too guarded I wanted the younger brother, especially, to embrace the very existence of Mrs. S and her kindness. To enter head on into that space for a while, even if it’s a fantasy.
It’s clear that the brothers’ parents have died, but they have a sister they’ve been searching for. Mrs. S, they learn, is looking for a granddaughter. How much hope do you want the reader to feel about whether the brothers will find their sister?
I have a feeling most readers will suspect this is a hopeless mission, that it has always been a hopeless mission, but I think the general stability of their days in the city with Mrs. S cracks open a little bit of magical thinking. And a more powerful hope, a deeper hope. For me, it was less about finding the sister, but the danger, for them, of feeling that deeper hope and yearning again—that yearning for an answer, for a resolution, and how far they can take it before they reach a point of no return, an even darker place.
A railroad has been rebuilt between the city and the country’s west coast. Everyone has taken to calling it “the new coast” and imagines it as full of new buildings. When you started writing the story, did you know what the coast would look like?
I knew it would certainly be not unlike the city in how far away it was from being restored, and I knew there was going to be one building there that seems newish, but I had no idea what that building was and whom they would meet when I started the story. And I still had no idea until the brothers were off the train, standing on the coast! But I think this is where autobiography comes in. My grandfather, as many know, founded an orphanage after the Korean War, and I’ve spent all my life wondering who those children were—I never really found out. It felt natural in that moment, to enter that personal mystery, just as the brothers are about to possibly confront their own.
