Photo by Emil Cohen
Interview by Vera Tomasi
I first read Stuart Nadler’s work at Bennington College, where he served as my advisor. In fact, within my first twenty-four hours at Bennington, I encountered two versions of Stuart Nadler. The first Stuart gave a reading of his story The Moon, The Mirrors of History, and The Death of Youth. It’s a strange, hilarious, and disturbing piece about genocide and memory, art-making and family, and the nature of death. In The Moon, etc., different possibilities exist simultaneously (the narrator is murdered and yet he survives) and the act of “taking” someone’s life becomes a double entendre, such that murdering someone is a way of becoming them.
The next day, I encountered a second Stuart: the author of The Book of Life, his beautiful debut collection. The stories in that book are intimate, realist family dramas. Their tight structures lend the endings, which often involve moments of yearning and reflection, a sense of inevitability. When I looked up from my reading that day, I wondered, “Were these stories really written by the same guy?”
The question is apt, since doppelgangers and imposters fill Stuart’s new novel, Rooms For Vanishing. The book deals with the members of an Austrian Jewish family, each of whom believes that they are the family’s sole survivor of the Holocaust. As in The Moon, The Mirrors of History, and The Death of Youth, the nature of reality in Rooms For Vanishing is unstable. Family members are apparently reunited and yet remain apart. Ghosts abound. At its core, the novel is about the destabilizing nature of trauma and grief. As one character, a survivor of the Holocaust, says, “We are living in the absence of the world” and all that remains is “nonsense.” Rooms For Vanishing depicts a world in which nonsense and absurdity predominate, and flashes of apparent hope are often illusory. Still, it is a world in which love and humor remain possible, and the beauty of Stuart’s writing seems, on some level, to recreate the meaning whose loss it laments.
I spoke with Stuart over Zoom to discuss the dangers of beauty, the difficulties of depicting atrocity in art, and the value of humor in dark times.
Vera Tomasi: I want to start with a question about beauty. Rooms For Vanishing is a beautifully written novel, and yet the book is full of warnings against beauty. One character, for instance, says, “Beauty, I understood, was a perfume covering something others did not want you to find.” Another gives up the cello because “he had no wish to make anything beautiful. All of it seemed to him to be a lie, a wallpaper over history.” Was there a certain type of beauty that you wanted to avoid in this book, maybe especially given its concern with historical atrocity?
Stuart Nadler: One of the things that I was working against in this novel was this impulse that narrative artists have to adhere structures onto stories about history. These structures that we’re often talking about in writing classrooms, for instance. I got really interested in the question, “What happens when those structures get superimposed onto a story about calamity, whether it’s a story about the Holocaust, or a story about other historical calamities, catastrophes, genocides?” Part of what I grew up with were stories that adhere to these structures. So I was thinking about and obsessing over this idea, and also the idea of the stories about these atrocities being trivialized, and I think there’s an obvious relationship between one and the other. Like, if a great deal of narrative art about the Holocaust has a happy ending or ends on a note of redemption, what does that mean for the generations growing up for whom that’s the story?
I’m really aware that these stories that resolve themselves neatly have a certain beauty to them. Like, there is a beauty in neatly structured, ordered designs, whether it’s a design of nature or a design of art. I spent a lot of time with the literature, music, and art of the Romantic era while I was working on this. I think that spirit is really obvious in the book, and so much of the music, for instance, of that era is so structured. Part of its beauty is in that structure, you know? Part of the emotion that happens in the listener when the music resolves itself, that’s beauty, right? I talk about this a lot in the classroom. It’s very easy for someone to tell the difference between beauty and sentimentality when they’re listening, and it’s much harder when you are reading something. I’m really interested in these spaces where beauty and sentimentality and kitsch come together, especially this idea of kitsch being a kind of pejorative that gets foisted on Jewish art, Jewish music, Jewish literature.
The prose of this book is really consciously attempting a kind of beauty and there’s something that happens when you’re regarding something that’s horrible in this kind of beautiful costumery. I like that friction, and I was really interested in it, because people construct their lives around ideas of beauty: their own beauty, the beauty of the people they live around, the beauty of their objects, the beauty of the view of their apartment. Like, Fania [a character who has survived the Holocaust] gets mad when the view from her apartment gets taken away, and so even if you’re struggling with grief, or if you’re lived through an upheaval in your life, the demands of beauty on the psyche are never alleviated. What does that do to your sense of your own aesthetics, or the aesthetics of the art that surrounds you? I mean, I don’t know that I have an answer to this. I think it’s the kind of question that the book is grappling with: [what are the] moral obligations of aestheticizing history or aestheticizing tragedy? Part of that is thinking about these ideas of beauty in ways that are obvious and in ways that are ungainly. I think a lot of this novel is me kind of questioning that.
VT: I’d love to hear more about your approach to depicting atrocity. I was really struck by the way that narrators in this novel often talk around the specifics of the Holocaust and the Nazi regime. It seemed to me that the novel operates in a space between the poles of two different positions. Fania, when she’s talking about the Nazis tearing her family apart, says, “to say it aloud is a profanity. This much is already a profanity,” but Hermann is eager to tell stories about the pain he’s suffered because “this is how one begins to become human again.” It seemed to me that the novel charts a course between these two ideas. Could you say more about how you approached the depiction of atrocity and trauma?
SN: You picked out the two specific polarities that I put into the book consciously as a way of thinking about it. I think anybody in my position, who’s writing about this, is grappling with that Adorno idea that after Auschwitz there is no poetry. And I understand that intuitively, obviously. There’s a great deal of contemporaneous literature of survivors that was not the project I’m making, and there’s a great deal of an adjacent literature, the contemporaneous literature of survivorhood, and that’s also not the project I was engaged in. I was engaged, very consciously, with the question, “What does it mean to be me writing in 2025?” You know, somebody who would be the grandchild of these people grappling with this.
I think part of what I got interested in was understanding both of those polarities to be true, so that to say it is a profanity and to ignore it allows a kind of trivialization or sentimentalizing of it, and to touch both of those polarities in the same section of the novel (I think both of those quotations are from the same section of the book), that seemed really attractive to me. I feel both of those statements viscerally. I feel both of them to be viscerally true, and I kind of love an art that makes me feel both of them at the same time. That’s what I was hoping for.
I’m also thinking about, “What does it even mean to make a novel in 2025?” You know, I don’t want to make some kind of adjunct to television, this sort of provisional blueprint for the miniseries, and I’m like,”Well, what is a novel?” A novel to me right now in 2025 is something that might allow for all possibilities, and so this was a way for me to build a technology that did all of this at the same time, to test myself.
VT: I wonder, which works of art that deal with the Holocaust, or with other atrocities, do you find especially moving and insightful?
SN: I recently read 2666, the Bolano novel, for the first time. It’s this fictionalized account of the femicides in Juarez. I’m a huge fan of his work, I mean I think he’s one of the real geniuses, and the middle of the book is this account of the death of every one of the women. It’s really long, occasionally impenetrable, and it’s this kind of amazing moral challenge in a book that is, in the sections before that, really fleet, fast, suspenseful, mysterious, evocative, like, really alluring, and then you get to this brick in the middle of the book where the book is begging for you to skip it, and to avert your eyes. I found that awful in the genuine way, but also really thrilling. I love artwork that does that to me. I felt awful experiencing that, and that’s the kind of thing that I’m drawn to.
Before we started recording, you were talking about the Kertesz novel Kaddish For An Unborn Child, which I think is a great book but also a really hard reading experience. I think you can agree, right? That’s not, like, a pleasurable book. And that, in itself, is a really interesting question. So much of what it means to be a writer in 2025 isn’t about pleasure. The question for me is, what does it mean to make something about grief, this big, weird book about grief and the ghosts that people make for themselves, and have that be a pleasurable experience? Is that the goal? Which is a hard thing to grapple with.
VT: It’s interesting, though, because I sometimes read novels that are concerned with really disturbing material in which there’s no room for hope, no room for joy, and I think of that Ben Lerner line, “there’s too much piety in despair.” I sometimes feel that when I read a book with no glimpse of hope, or no shimmer of a possibility beyond the brutality of moment-by-moment living, I feel that the novel is almost misrepresenting human experience. I was really struck by the way that Rooms For Vanishing, as deeply disturbing as it is, has moments of real joy, moments of real hope. There’s at least one moment that felt almost miraculous, when two lovers are torn apart, but their respective children end up getting married and having a child. I wonder if you struggled with how much hope to bring into the novel, given that it’s grappling with atrocity. Did you ever worry, “Am I letting in too much joy? Or not enough?”
SN: I struggled with the darkness, not the joy. This might sound cheap, but the life and joy in this book felt to me like a kind of Jewish inheritance. I feel like that’s the cultural inheritance that I’ve been given, at least artistically. So that felt natural. The idea of the miraculous, that was different. In that part, I was really consciously playing with ideas of unreality. My whole idea in making this book was to build an object that worked in two ways. To build an object where if you knew the history, then you would believe me when I told you the history the whole time. So, if I tell you that the characters are dead in the beginning, you’ll believe me the whole time. You’ll believe the veracity of the history that’s being told to you.
Then, when you encounter all of the unreal things that happen in this book, whether it’s a hundred-year-old man running through Vienna or a ghost appearing or a woman meeting her double in the basement of a hotel in Montreal, then that would impel you to layer your own cosmology of grief onto this. But if you are somebody who doesn’t know the history, or wants to disbelieve the history, or doesn’t want to believe that the things I’m telling you are true, that it couldn’t have been this bad, that not everybody is dead, not the babies too, then all of the unreal things that happen in this book might be reasons to hope. And that friction was something that I was super conscious of.
I think I wrote the Arnold section first, the train-station section. I don’t remember the next section I wrote after that, because I wrote this book out of order, but the moment that I decided that that person would also be dead, that friction immediately became super interesting to me. So, you know, if I was going to think about it honestly, then the darkness would be there and the light would be there, too. Then it’s allowed to have jokes, right? Because, like, this is something that people just do. People joke. This is sort of a wonderful thing about living through dark times, right? The humor is good. So that’s another long answer to a good question, but I think, to come back to the beginning, I had a much harder time tempering the lightness.
VT: Speaking of comedy, I especially loved the way that Hermann and Fania are always berating each other for making jokes about their suffering, although humor is also crucial to their relationship. And yet, those comedic exchanges obviously remain heartbreaking and disturbing. They’re never just funny in a way that isn’t deepening.
SN: Right. This is sort of the luxury that they have. If they’re not going to joke about it, then who jokes about it? Are there any jokes that are okay? So them chastising themselves for telling jokes seems like the most natural thing. That’s something that felt very true to life for me.
I mean, in some ways, none of these people are true to life, obviously. So much of this project was about moving away from the psychological, humanistic realism that I had been writing in all my other books, because I did not feel while I was writing this that we were living in realist times. It really felt and continues to feel like a lie to write that kind of fiction. So I was like, “Well, what do I do now as somebody who’s just been writing that way?”
VT: So did this more surreal, fragmented style emerge in part because you wanted to deal with this material? Or was it more a reaction to your feelings about the world in general? I guess I’m wondering whether the subject matter and the style emerged together, or whether one led to the other.
SN: It was a really slow process, honestly. I wrote this book at the same time as I was writing a collection of stories, some of which you’ve heard, so I had these two projects happening simultaneously.
In some sense, I was thinking of the stories as an opportunity for me to play. Some of it was about disregarding reality, and some of it was also this opportunity for me to play with language in a way that felt really distended from the kind of realist writing I was doing before. I was just like, “What happens if you write a whole story that reads like a prose poem, basically?” And that felt really relieving to me because I’ve been working on this novel, you know, off and on for such a long time. But then the projects bled into each other a little bit. So what was scary in the beginning for me about taking these leaps didn’t feel so scary to me at the end.
I think the very last section I wrote was the penultimate section of the novel, that second section about Moses, which felt like the wildest thing I’d ever written and the most uncompromising. I was just like, “This is gonna come at the end of this very long book, if you’ve made it this far. This is really going to test you.” And I kind of like that. But a lot of it, I think, was not so much a response to life but a response to exhaustion with the demands of [realist] literature. I think if you inherit that sort of realist tradition and work on it really hard, the mechanical conventions and demands start to feel tiring. I’m not the only person who’s said this, but I think there’s a reason why everybody responded to Rachel Cusk and Knausgaard the way that they did. All the technical brilliance of Rachel Cusk’s books felt like a real thumb in the nose of a kind of adherence to realist conventions.
It’s like Philip Roth’s idea of the American Bizarro. Like, it doesn’t really matter how good a job you think you’re doing of capturing the world as it is. The world is always going to be more fucked up. So much of the experience of making this book was just wanting to renovate the kind of art I was making because, after a certain time, it didn’t feel authentic.
VT: I wonder how you feel about contemporary realism as a reader. Could you read a new book in a realist style and think, “This is amazing?”
SN: Yeah. But, you know, I read Tony Tulathimutte’s book Rejection, and I was like, “Oh, this is realism.” This book that’s super online and, you know, gripping, but also consciously repulsive. And I was like, this is really what it feels like to be alive right now. So much of the current moment is about coexisting with ugliness and a kind of cultural pornography. I thought [Rejection] was really extraordinary and not mannered, and I think that’s the risk. There’s a way of mimicking that realist vocabulary that ends up feeling mannered, or at least the way I was doing it.
But, of course, there are so many people who do it well. Like, I love Marilynne Robinson, who I studied with when I was in school. I mean, she’s a realist writer, and nobody writes quite like her. There’s a lot of life in her work that I find really attractive. There’s a really specific combination of American idioms in her writing that feels genuinely real. And I think, for me, the project here was to avail myself to all the other idiomatic ways of thinking that I’ve grown up with, which was this experimental Jewish art, for lack of a better way of summarizing it.
VT: What are some of the books, or works in other mediums, that this novel is in conversation with?
SN: A lot of music, certainly. A lot of the music of turn-of-the-century Austria, especially Mahler. I got very interested in the combination of the immense scope of the symphonies and also the combination of texture in [those works], which is, like, sentimentality, kitsch, ugliness, protest, pastiche.
For literature, certainly Sebald. I got obsessed with a way of fragmenting the novel that he does really well in The Emigrants. Nicole Krauss’s great book, The Great House, the structure of which I borrowed for this and used differently. Who else? Isaac Bashevis Singer, especially Enemies, A Love Story, which I love. Bruno Schultz, obviously. Definitely Kundera.
I put myself through this long project of not reading American literature for a while while I was writing this. I taught a class at Bennington while I was working on this [book] on interwar European literature in which we read Marina Sverdova and Anna Akhmatova, and then we read Bulgakov and Kafka and Bruno Schultz. It was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had in the classroom. Those were the sort of writers who I was obsessing over when I wrote this.
VT: I know that you wrote the stories in your first collection very quickly, and I think you wrote Wise Men quickly, too. I wonder how your relationship with this book is different, given that you spent so much time on it?
SN: Publishing is so weird, because the book that emerges is a time capsule of a moment that has already passed. I wrote most of this book before the pandemic, so my relation to it is strange and attenuated. It was this companion of mine for a very long time, and I was loath to let go of it, because the writing is the part I like. Publishing is not the part I like. Maybe there’ll be some way of doing this in the future where you could share the work without publishing. I don’t know.
But the first book I wrote in my mid-twenties, and now I’m in my mid-forties, so my relation to this book is totally different. I was much more comfortable just having it be messy. My favorite art is really messy art. My first book was my graduate thesis at the writer’s workshop, and I love those stories, but they’re very controlled. Part of the exercise of making those pieces was learning that control. And my favorite parts of that book are the parts that are really out of control, which were the pieces where, in workshop, people were like, “You should cut this.” It’s interesting, though, because part of the fun of being a short-story writer and a novelist is moving back and forth between those two ideas. So my relationship to this book is just that it’s a really concentrated moment in time. Publishing ends up being a weird astronomical echo. This is the writing I did in 2019, and it’s slowly made its way to the page.
About the interviewer: Vera Tomasi is a writer who graduated from Brown University in 2019 with a degree in Literary Arts. They are currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at Bennington College.”