Announcer: We're joined now by Vinson Cunningham, staff writer at The New Yorker. Vinson, if you want to know what's interesting to read or what plays to see, what to watch, he's somebody you want to hear from. Here's Vinson Cunningham.

Vinson Cunningham: I wanted to talk to Jen Silverman because, in my capacity as a theater critic, I encountered this lovely play of theirs. It's called Spain. It's about two filmmakers who are covertly Russian propagandists. I thought it was so interesting and politically astute and funny in a way that I just wanted to check out anything they had done. I was so excited because, in addition to being a playwright, Jen also writes novels.

They've just written a new novel, it's called There's Going to Be Trouble. There's Going to Be Trouble takes place on two timelines. One is closer to the present. It's 2018 and a teacher finds herself in the middle of the Gilets jaunes protests in France. You may remember the truck drivers and the yellow vests upset about oil prices and cost of living, economic inequality in France.

Participant 1: It is one of the simplest and here in France, commonest items of clothing to be found. The high visibility jacket or gilet jaunes in French, yellow vest, obligatory here in France to have in your car, in case, you break down or have an accident. Yet it became a real symbol of defiance against the authorities and president--

Vinson Cunningham: Then, in 1968, we have a group of students who are leading protests at Harvard University.

Participant 2: These are members of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS. They demand an end to reserve officer training on the Harvard campus, at an end, to Harvard expansion into surrounding neighborhoods in [unintelligible 00:01:53]. This is the beginning of a crisis at Harvard, and this is the battle cry.

Vinson Cunningham: How do you place human drama, things like romance and desire and personal hopes? How do you set that against history that we all remember? How do you set that against the backdrop of politics? Jen has so closely intermingled these things, made one thing flow out of the other, and I knew that we had to talk.

Announcer: Here's staff Vinson Cunningham talking with playwright and novelist Jen Silverman.

Vinson Cunningham: Jen, it's so cool to have you here to talk about your book, There's Going to Be Trouble, which to me, that's like a title that every novel should have. It's the promise of the novel, of anything narrative, is like, there's going to be some trouble here.

[laughter]

Vinson Cunningham: I love the eventuality in the rhythm of that title. The fact is, the trouble starts immediately in this book. More precisely, it starts in 2018, the Gilets jaunes moment in Paris. Could you talk a little bit about just that setting and then also, the challenges of writing about moments of protest?

Jen Silverman: Yes, I was actually in Paris in 2018 at the beginning of the Gilets jaunes protests, which then, of course, continued and have changed and evolved. I stumbled into a protest by accident before I really understood what was going on. I will say it took me a long time and research for this novel to even have a slightly better sense of what was going on.

Vinson Cunningham: That's right.

Jen Silverman: Then to my fascination, there were so many different kinds of people around me. There were professors and there were truck drivers, there were so many women. I had not at that point-- and again, this is 2018, and a lot changed in America after that as well, but I had not at that point been at a protest that felt so full of people from different class backgrounds, different trades, different approaches, and they all wanted the same thing. Then my question was, well, what is it that people are here for? Then of course there's a moment where things turned and it started to get-- the police showed up looking like an army and there were vehicles rolling down the street that were--

Vinson Cunningham: Military-looking, yes.

Jen Silverman: -in military-looking.

[laughter]

Jen Silverman: There was a moment where the energy changed and it suddenly started feeling quite dangerous. It was out of that that I had been thinking about these questions of protest and revolution. What do we do when we find ourselves in a moment where you start to ask, are things changing? Could they change? Is this just a different point in the endless cycle of non-change? That experience of being there and then my curiosity about it started to feed what became the book.

Vinson Cunningham: One of your lead characters, I like her so much, her name is Minnow. She is at a dinner party, and she's talking about the brilliance of the protest is its openness to all different kinds of interpretations. Of course, the problem with that is legibility, right? I think this was a befuddling from America. Is this a progressive anti-Macronism? Is this something that seems a bit more like what we are experiencing with Trump? How did you, Jen, in real life, parse through that?

Jen Silverman: Yes, it is the multifaceted nature of it, the shape-shifting quality that was so mesmerizing to me. I should say, I think, the question of how people who think of themselves as a political people get pulled into a vibrant political context. When we talk about politics, it's so easy to think that we're talking about ideologies and strategies and intellectual analysis, and often we are.

The part that fascinates me most is what's under that, that we get pulled into political contexts because we have desire, we have ambition, we have fear, we fall in love with someone like Minnow, who is in every way an outsider and who up until recently. She flees to Paris because she gets unwittingly pulled into this political upheaval in her small town in America.

Vinson Cunningham: That's right.

Jen Silverman: She has thought of herself for so long, I think as a bystander. Then she's at this dinner party because she has started to conduct an affair with this younger man who is an activist. It is through that context, that she's trying to understand what the invitation is. When I say invitation, I mean the invitation that the Gilets jaunes are offering with their lack of legibility.

Vinson Cunningham: That's right.

Jen Silverman: That was the invitation for Minnow that I really wanted to explore is how she chooses what she wants to hear and then moves toward that thing.

Vinson Cunningham: Yes, there's a great passage in this book very early on that just honestly just reminds me of the past. I thought a lot about 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests and COVID and the upheavals then. Minnow gets caught up in a protest. She doesn't totally know what it is. She sees a guy from work, Charles. Somehow, things get more physical and violent than she realized the protest like this would. Charles and his friend come and they run away. It's just this awesome passage of action.

They are running through side streets getting away from all this. Minnow is breathing super hard. She realizes that amid all the fear and everything else that she's feeling, there's also an ecstasy that she's feeling, and this to me seems such a generous admission and also dangerous material. Usually, when we talk about activism, we don't talk about the pure pleasure that you get from something that is, of course, adrenaline-inducing.

Later on, in the 1969-1968 timeline, there's a young man who gets behind a bullhorn for the first time and realizes his rhetorical power. I think it's what some of us fear about protests. Where does that sit with you? On some level, the book is about many things, but it's on some level about the gratifications of being part of a crowd.

Jen Silverman: Yes.

Vinson Cunningham: How did you think your way into that?

Jen Silverman: I find crowds terrifying and fascinating. I love people. I love individual people. I love strangers. I'm talking to strangers. The minute there are more than four people present in any space, it's like this, often like a single organism starts to function in a way that is atavistic and instinctual, and we become often different people inside those spaces than we would be when we're alone. I think I have a deep, deep distrust of large groups of people. At the same time, I work in the theater, you work in the theater.

Vinson Cunningham: Yes.

Jen Silverman: I think of, often, not always, I think of protests or staged activist events as inherently theatrical, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I think theater isn't-- I've used this word before, but it's an invitation to an audience to enter space, to sit together, to breathe together, to receive together, to get some spiritual electric charge, and then to leave that space. Those who have received it, not everyone will, of course.

When I think about protests through that lens, it makes an inherent sense to me. When I have been at protests, both in the States, and then ultimately in Paris, there is a way in which I feel it hit my body like a piece of theater, which is not to say it's false or fake, but rather, there's an intellectual thing happening, and then there is also, as you said, a deeply visceral, emotional--

Vinson Cunningham: Embodied.

Jen Silverman: -embodied thing, yes, that's happening.

Vinson Cunningham: Well, the part of me that was combing your fiction for ideas about your theater-making laughed at an early protest in this book, there's like puppets.

[laughter]

Vinson Cunningham: It's like that, okay.

Jen Silverman: Yes. There were four to five paragraphs about those puppets and my editor is like, "We need one." She was like, "I know you're really interested in puppets, but I guarantee nobody else is."

[laughter]

Jen Silverman: But she said it nicely.

Vinson Cunningham: Can I ask a craft question-

Jen Silverman: Of course.

Vinson Cunningham: -in terms of all this, what we've been talking about? In this book, there are many great parties. House Party Rages in '68, Gentil Bourgeois dinner party arguments in 2018. How much is a party like a protest in how you write it?

Jen Silverman: I had not thought about that until you said it and I love that comparison because I actually think it's very true. Again, it's the constant tension between the group and the individual, and those tensions fascinate me. The question also in both a protest and a party of how we present ourselves, how we perform ourselves, a kind of a persona. The moment that you mentioned from '68 where the character, Keen speaks into a bullhorn for the first time, and the whole crowd loves him.

It changes for him the way he sees himself and what he thinks he's capable of and then when later that night he goes to the party, that essentially becomes a celebration of him and what he did at this protest crowd event. He has a different way of manifesting who he is in that group of people. A different way of being seen because he's now able to see himself slightly differently.

Then I should also say both my parents were at Harvard during that time. My dad was a physics grad student. He's a physicist. My mom was a chemistry grad student. The experiment that we met Keen trying to solve, that was my mom's experiment.

Vinson Cunningham: Really?

Jen Silverman: I made her explain it to me. I'm raised by two scientists, I do not have a brain for science and numbers-

Vinson Cunningham: Wow.

Jen Silverman: -in any way, but both my parents, they have this real passion for science and when they describe what any experiment is or what it is meant to do, there's a narrative to it and so I've always found it fascinating to listen to them talk about this field for which they have the kind of passion that I have for the arts.

Vinson Cunningham: One of your scientist characters, again, this a young guy Keen, who I think is so not to pun, but so keenly drawn. He is a scientist whose father is a preacher.

Jen Silverman: Yes.

Vinson Cunningham: He's talking about the structure of his father's worldview, and I think this is the worldview is on some level also the problem in this book because it's like that's the thing that you cannot change. That's the thing that will follow you across the ocean or whatever, follow you from religion to science. It will just stay with you. He's talking about his father and he says, "And when you receive the world as a masterpiece, you see what's beautiful first and what's horrifying afterwards, and everything that's horrifying can feel like an aberration. The devil at work disrupting God's plan."

This thing of like, the world is beautiful, and therefore, anything that marrs this composition by God, this divine painting, it's something that we can hammer out in the same way that one hammers sin out of a personality or something like that. I read that and I felt attacked. I think that's how I actually see the world, and I was thinking that people that tell stories have to decide on how they actually see the world, where they think the source of trouble is. Whether they think trouble is fundamental or goodness is fundamental.

Jen Silverman: Yes.

Vinson Cunningham: Did writing this reveal some of that about yourself to you?

Jen Silverman: Yes. It made me confront the real dichotomy that I think I'm constantly trying to navigate, which is intellectually, the trouble is fundamental. Then every time, I'm always emotionally surprised when I encounter how terrible things can be or how cruel an individual can be to another individual. There's a way in which my brain says I knew it, but everything in my body is surprised.

Vinson Cunningham: One similarity that struck me between this book and your last book We Play Ourselves is that the protagonists have secrets or incidents in their past that not only belong to chronologically the past, but to another place.

Jen Silverman: Yes.

Vinson Cunningham: I just wondered how you think about how our past, maybe this is just a question about storytelling. How our recent past conditions how we live in the present?

Jen Silverman: It's a question that I really wrestle with a lot. I think in my 20s, I had this idea probably because of the way that I first was raised and then raised myself moving from place to place. I had this idea that you can switch countries, you can switch cities, and when you do that, you get to switch lives. You just start over.

Vinson Cunningham: You have to change.

Jen Silverman: You change. Yes, change. That's so easy.

Vinson Cunningham: That's the promise.

Jen Silverman: That's the promise, and it's--

Vinson Cunningham: Of travel, of relocation, of migration. This is the big thing as you can be new.

Jen Silverman: You change and it's seductive. The transformation that is just waiting for you around the corner. Then, of course, you get a little bit older and you realize everywhere you go, you just bring yourself. I'm not the first person who said that. What became, I think narratively and what is now narratively really interesting to me is, I almost want to say the failure of transformation, except that I'm never quite sure if it is a failure, but the promise that is just out of reach.

I haven't changed yet, but what would it take for me to change? I'm fascinated by the ways in which individuals seek to change and all of the ways in which we try to escape ourselves, and then of course, the ways in which communities try to change and the many, many failures and attempts and small successes inherent in that.

Vinson Cunningham: I can't even realize my easiest to do, but I just want to be a guy who drinks green juices or whatever, and I can't accomplish that, so it's like I'm also going to change the world, like what--

Jen Silverman: [laughs] Right.

Vinson Cunningham: Now I'm going to jet us back to this text. Some of the most interesting arguments in this book are about how to see Emmanuel Macron. I don't know how to see him. He's such an interesting world leader, and most of the time, I'm irritated at the things he does to put it most lightly, but I don't know, there's something about him. Did you develop a theory of Macron?

Jen Silverman: I did not, but what fascinates me about him and what I think contributes to the polarization is his charisma. When you have that charisma in a political leader, in a religious leader, in an activist, there's a way in which people respond to the charisma before they even respond to what the person is saying. I think that has worked for him and that it has, of course, worked against him. Again, when we were talking about the ambiguities of the Gilets Jaunes Movement and how we read ourselves into those ambiguities, what interests me most about Macron is how people are reading themselves into and against him because he's hard to pin down. I don't know how to pin him down.

Vinson Cunningham: He's far, far in the background of this novel. It's not like it's a excavation into him personally, but it just, you are almost sociological description of the many possible ways into this movement made me think about how a charismatic leader, the same way they can form great coalitions on their behalf, can form interesting coalitions against them or something like that.

Jen Silverman: Yes. Then the tension there, of course, this is 2018, Trump is our president at that time and Minnow is coming into this context with like, "Your president is well dressed and articulate and seems to be a bit of a humanist, what are you all so mad about?" I think the book itself is really invested in these characters who are in contexts that they don't understand, come to understand, perhaps misunderstand without necessarily trying to tell the audience, this is the political ideology that you should embrace. This is the answer. This is what will give us change. This is who these political people are. That escapes me and I didn't want to lie which is a funny thing to say in fiction, but--

Vinson Cunningham: That's right. Jen, this has been so wonderful. Thank you so much for this book and thank you so much for coming to talk to me, this has been great.

Jen Silverman: Thank you so much for having me. I've really enjoyed it.

[music]

Announcer: Jen Silverman's new novel is There's Going to Be Trouble. Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and you can hear him talking with his colleagues every week about what's happening in the culture on our podcast Critics at Large.

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