Interview with author Katherine Neville

Interview with author Katherine Neville with Melissa A. Bartell

When it comes to the concepts of “naughty” and “nice,” nothing epitomizes the eternal struggle between them quite like a chessboard, and no one writes novels that make chess seem like an adventure better than Katherine Neville. Twenty years ago, she published The Eight a novel that defies description, but has elements of swashbuckling action, intellectual mystery, true romance, and even some magical realism. In October, the sequel was finally released, and Ms. Neville took some time to answer questions about both books, as well as her writing process. She’s currently on tour promoting the new book, The Fire, but she’s also here in our pages, with these words:

Please tell our readers a bit about yourself: I know both from the bio at your website, KatherineNeville.com, and from the fly-leaf on the original copy of The Eight, as well as from various interviews, that you’ve worked at IBM, Bank of America, and with OPEC. How much of you is in Cat Velis, and how is she different from you?

It’s hard to realize, but when you write fiction, you yourself–the author–actually are all of the characters. In my case, even including Napoleon’s grandmother, Lord Byron, and the evil Marat. To make a character come alive, you have to be able to empathize, to put yourself in his shoes and speak from his point of view. It’s like what an actor does but even more so–because you have to imagine what he’d say, as well as say it for him.

As for the characters in The Eight, I’m often asked if I am “really” Cat Velis. Even though she does narrate events in first person, I personally feel that the character who is most like me in The Eight is Ladislaus Nim. He does the things I would do–for instance, I’d try to solve the formula and help humanity, not bury it or destroy it. As for my professional career–though it was a long time ago, I know that I never really thought like an executive. I was more of a high-level computer geek (they called us “technocrats” in those days)–and even today, I still get along really well with people who are up to their elbows in the nitty-gritty of science and technology. In fact–I even live with one! (Dr Karl Pribram, the noted brain scientist.)

A reader noted that the women in The Eight, especially Cat and Lily, were subject to some pretty rampant sexism, and wondered if that was an accurate portrayal of the time and place in which the novel was set? Also, have you been on the receiving end of sexism, in your own career, both before and since becoming a novelist?

Wow! So that’s what they call it now? “Rampant sexism?” In the 1960s and 70s they just called it Business as Usual. Back then, no one had even heard of a “glass ceiling.”

But any young girl who needs a refresher course today should run right out and get grandmaster Susan Polgar’s autobiography, Breaking Through: How the Polgar Sisters changed the Game of Chess. As the first woman in history to receive the male grandmaster title, Susan won her first competition at age four and she and her two younger sisters went on to take the chess world by storm for something like twenty years. She sent me this biography just after I’d finished my new book. I was flabbergasted how close it came to the backstory I’d invented for Lily Rad in The Eight, and also now for Cat and Solarin’s chess-whiz daughter, Xie, in The Fire – that the anti-female chess world that I’d imagined was that much – and then some.

One of the things I liked about The Eight when I read it twenty years ago, was that even though chess was an important theme and there was an actual game one could follow through the novel, knowing how to play chess was not crucial to enjoying the book. Are your chess skills good, or did you have help with the details? Is the new book, The Fire similarly constructed?

I love chess. Like Borges, Nabokov – and so many of my favorite writers of yore – I love the cosmic aspects of “the Game” and the interplay of long-range strategies and short-term tactics. I’ve always regretted that I learned to play chess too late ever to be any good at it.

As for assistance, when I wrote The Eight I had input from a friend who was a female chess competitor, and several International Masters who helped me find the game – from a score of those in international competition – upon which the plot of that very complex book could be based. But now, twenty years later, I’ve met grandmasters in other countries, I’ve been interviewed by chess magazines and asked to write chess stories – and I not only got help from a lot of chess wizards (I thank them all under Acknowledgments in my book) but also from a child chess champion, Alisa Melekhina, who helped me for the several years that I struggled to get inside the mind of my main character in The Fire: Alexandra Solarin.

Here is the full interview.