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"  If Thomas Pynchon owns the franchise in American literature on indecipherable conspiracy, and Joan Didion has lately with her rueful intelligence put her stamp on grief, so the novelist Susan Minot has earned a trademark on the subject of desire. &amp;quot;I could write a book about it,&amp;quot; she says with a throaty laugh, well aware that at 57, she already has\u2014quite a few, in fact. Desire and its sometimes obliterating consequences are a productive obsession that snakes through all of her fiction, from the erotic slide show of the short story &amp;quot;Lust,&amp;quot; written in the early &amp;#039;80s, to her exceptional new novel, Thirty Girls, which takes place in Africa and, despite its familiar preoccupations, represents a broadening vision for Minot. Related: Liquor is Quicker: On Writers and Drinking This afternoon, she commands the corner of a hotel lounge in Greenwich Village, a block or so from her home. It&amp;#039;s the sort of setting in which a character from one of Minot&amp;#039;s novels\u2014say, Rapture, or the best-selling Evening, later made into a film starring Meryl Streep\u2014might find herself in the heady, early stages of trouble. Since the publication of her rhapsodically reviewed Monkeys in 1986\u2014she was 29 then\u2014Minot has made a career of probing both the sucking black hole that is a wounded family and the escape velocity generated when her women seek a life of ardor outside it. Imprecisely tagged as a minimalist because her sentences were pared and her scenes spoke for themselves, she nonetheless often achieved a maximal devastation of effect. Related: &amp;#039;The Bridges of Madison County&amp;#039; Heads to Broadway with a Fresh Female Perspective Given her familiarity with the topic, I ask Minot whether she knows anything more about love than she did when she was younger. She teases out the question, careful to distinguish between love and desire\u2014&amp;quot;they&amp;#039;re not really the same,&amp;quot; she says. It&amp;#039;s clear that for her, stating things precisely is at once an involuntary character trait and a moral imperative. And then, whether out of politeness or evasion or curiosity or a Boston Brahmin reserve typical of one of her buttoned-up characters yearning for a less restrained life, Minot turns the tables. &amp;quot;Do you think there&amp;#039;s a big difference in your attitude?&amp;quot; she asks. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d like to think I&amp;#039;m wiser about the consequences, and I&amp;#039;m not sure that&amp;#039;s a good thing.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not, either. Of course, you are sure when disaster happens,&amp;quot; she says, again with that laugh, which vibrates with a kind of self-knowledge, perhaps hard-won. Her second marriage, to a boat builder, ended in 2010. Minot and her 12-year-old daughter, Ava, spend most of their time in New York City, where Ava goes to school. But they also live part of the year in North Haven, Maine, a place where work is something done &amp;quot;with a hammer,&amp;quot; Minot says. &amp;quot;There are aspects of love,&amp;quot; she says, worrying the question, picking her words carefully, with the same exactitude she displays in her prose, &amp;quot;that I once undervalued. Kindness. Having a sort of honor when love is on the table.&amp;quot; She confesses that in her younger days, she may have regarded as exciting the absence of such virtues, in either herself or others\u2014an allure attested to by several seductive portraits of cads in her fiction, who arouse the female heart far more than do the stolid husbands for whom the women often settle. &amp;quot;Of course, recklessness is par for the course when you&amp;#039;re 25,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Then, kindness doesn&amp;#039;t seem to reflect &amp;#039;telling it like it is,&amp;#039; which is more important when you are young.&amp;quot;  In the late &amp;#039;90s, at a time when family and friends were settling into marriage and domestic life, Minot found herself &amp;quot;unrooted.&amp;quot; She went to Africa at the invitation of Carter Coleman, a friend who had gone to the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania to hang glide with the eagles and write a novel. And so began a period of wandering through East Africa like a Hemingway hero, from Kenya to Tanzania to Uganda to Lesotho, with Minot hopscotching among expatriates, such as a friend&amp;#039;s mother who was married to a Masai warrior. In 2000, McSweeney&amp;#039;s published a dispatch by Minot called &amp;quot;This We Came to Know Afterward,&amp;quot; about the abduction of Ugandan schoolgirls in October 1996 by the Lord&amp;#039;s Resistance Army (LRA), which would one day provide the basis for Thirty Girls. For the first time ever, she wanted an immediate response to something she had written; she wanted -people to do something. She waited. She&amp;#039;s still waiting. She returned to the States, having decided that it was time to have a child. She was in her forties. &amp;quot;Having a family wasn&amp;#039;t ever the plan,&amp;quot; she says; &amp;quot;having a child was.&amp;quot; Previously, she hadn&amp;#039;t considered motherhood a viable option. &amp;quot;I came from a family of seven children, and I couldn&amp;#039;t relate to my mother&amp;#039;s role. I thought: A mother does that? But then I realized there was a part of my heart that wasn&amp;#039;t going to be activated except by a child. And maybe that part of my heart is a better part, because it wants to care for something. And in theory, it isn&amp;#039;t asking for anything back.&amp;quot; Minot smiles. &amp;quot;In theory.&amp;quot; Then she says, as if she&amp;#039;s spent plenty of time considering the difference between the theory and practice of parenthood: &amp;quot;Purity is hard.&amp;quot; Her daughter, Ava, was born in 2001. &amp;quot;One can always imagine,&amp;quot; Minot says, wondering what life would be like without her. &amp;quot;But it&amp;#039;s unimaginable. It would be a sad state of affairs.&amp;quot; As if on cue, a text from Ava arrives. She&amp;#039;s making her way through Manhattan with a friend, on her way home from school. &amp;quot;At the subway,&amp;quot; Minot reads aloud, tracking her daughter&amp;#039;s course like an air-traffic controller. &amp;quot;Ava was telling me about an exchange a friend of hers had with her mother,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;A guy asked her friend out, and the friend told her mother about it, and her mother laughed at her and said, &amp;#039;Oh, he asked you out!&amp;#039; And Ava said to me: &amp;#039;Would you laugh? Because I would like you to.&amp;#039; In other words, &amp;#039;Don&amp;#039;t take me so seriously.&amp;#039; She gets a lot of me.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s a common plight for an only child, of course. Minot&amp;#039;s own upbringing was quite the opposite; in her family, which served as the model for Monkeys, she was the outlier\u2014though, as she says, &amp;quot;No one would have known it. I kept it under wraps.&amp;quot; Having grown up north of Boston in one of those New England families whose lineage dates back to Puritan times, she went off to boarding school at Concord Academy, where she was a friend of Caroline Kennedy&amp;#039;s. And while Minot possessed a cool, elegant exterior, she secretly admired those who wore their rebellion on their sleeves. (She picks at her own sleeve as she talks.) &amp;quot;When I was in my teens and twenties,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;I could see friends expressing how radical they were, and I envied them, the way they lived, the way they dressed. Maybe there is a part of me that is reserved, even in rebellion.&amp;quot; In that context, it&amp;#039;s not surprising that she mutinied against tradition by choosing one Ivy League college over another. &amp;quot;My father went to Harvard,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;My sister went to Harvard. So I went to Brown. I was going to step out!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I was not interested in fun,&amp;quot; she says of those years. &amp;quot;I was interested in smoking cigarettes, listening to music. That was not fun, it was cool.&amp;quot; A drug of choice was literature. &amp;quot;Faulkner blew my little mind,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s that quote? &amp;#039;Memory believes before knowing remembers.&amp;#039; Readers understand before the brain processes.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;s still a little averse to fun as a ruling principle. In Maine, where she spends summers, she may join in a cocktail party or a lobster dinner after working all day. But even then, she says, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not living the total vacation life. I&amp;#039;m not experiencing what everyone else is experiencing. But that would be the story of the writer, no? And that would be the case wherever I am.&amp;quot; The working title of the new novel was Flight, perhaps once emblematic of Minot&amp;#039;s escape from the perils of involuntary domesticity and equally suited, though for different reasons, to the two protagonists of Thirty Girls. One of them is Jane, an American writer abroad, a little lost, with no apparent idea of how confident she appears to others. (&amp;quot;Funnily enough, it&amp;#039;s been my experience occasionally,&amp;quot; Minot says dryly, in response to an observation about her similarity to the protagonist.) She meets a young paraglider in Kenya. They make out rapturously in the mud of a back road on a rainy night. And then they fall in together with a gang of -expats who pile into a truck and bounce over rutted tracks on their way to the Ugandan highlands, where Jane will -report on the abduction of the schoolgirls. \u202AEsther, the other protagonist, a Ugandan teen, has her own voyage to make, in her case not quite so leisurely, having been kidnapped from her Catholic boarding school by rebels and escorted at gunpoint through the bush to the southern Sudan, where the LRA&amp;#039;s leader, Joseph Kony, irks her with his mystical rants. Along the way, she is raped, impregnated, and forced to help beat another girl to death.\u202C Although the two narratives eventually converge, the danger throughout is that they might resist each other like oil and water, so disproportionate is their apparent gravity. Minot worried\u2014&amp;quot;every day,&amp;quot; she says\u2014about how well she was evoking Esther&amp;#039;s voice. And yet it was perhaps equally hard to depict the compassionate impulses of a privileged American without the sort of mockery that sours V. S. Naipaul&amp;#039;s pitiless vision of the postcolonial world. Whereas he might have savaged Jane as a misguided savior luxuriating in a warm bath of her own altruism, Minot honors the attempts of a romantic breaking free of uneasy privilege and extending her notion of love from the personal to the social realm. &amp;quot;Kindness, after all!&amp;quot; Minot says about her portrayal of Jane. &amp;quot;Everyone&amp;#039;s trying. It&amp;#039;s easy to make people look like jerks.&amp;quot; At the same time she reveals Esther to be more than just another generic victim of atrocity by showing a teenager dreaming of love and boys (this is a Minot character, after all) even in the midst of her captivity. The novel ends on a fragile but unmistakable note of hope. Thirty Girls took seven years to write, an eternity for Minot. The prospect of grinding away page by page deterred her until she decided that she had better start working again for &amp;quot;financial reasons\u2014a motivation you don&amp;#039;t have to argue with.&amp;quot; She hopes the book will demonstrate that &amp;quot;psychological struggle doesn&amp;#039;t disappear in the face of war.&amp;quot; And that despite the differences, Jane&amp;#039;s and Esther&amp;#039;s ordeals &amp;quot;happen in the same place\u2014not just in that crazy world of Africa where they&amp;#039;re slicing each other&amp;#039;s lips off all the time.&amp;quot; Minot pulls a notebook from her bag\u2014notebook 136A. She&amp;#039;s been keeping a journal without fail since she was 13 and has numbered them all. If such precocious and steady record-keeping makes it seem as if she grew up in a cosmopolitan, literary family (and indeed, her brother George and sister Eliza are also novelists), she is quick to correct the record, saying that the Minots &amp;quot;spent more time watching Gilligan&amp;#039;s Island than talking about books.&amp;quot; She reads aloud a Hilary Mantel quote about Naipaul that she&amp;#039;s pasted onto a page: &amp;quot;He is the person most haunted by what he&amp;#039;s rejected, by the childhood he cast off, by the private fear he has made into a universal condition.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;She is defending Naipaul&amp;#039;s crotchetiness,&amp;quot; Minot explains. Did she cannibalize her notebooks for Thirty Girls? &amp;quot;Not cannibalized. Lifted\u2014I lifted from them,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;They are mine, after all.&amp;quot; Another text pings in. Ava is home. &amp;quot;Have a snack,&amp;quot; Minot types back. At Christmas, she&amp;#039;s taking her daughter to Kenya for the first time, to visit friends. It&amp;#039;s been many years since the writer has been there. She hears it&amp;#039;s changed. Of course, the entire world has changed, in Minot&amp;#039;s view, with its predilection for speed, information, loudness, instant gratification. &amp;quot;Subtlety is completely lost on everyone!&amp;quot; she exclaims, a heartbreaking fact for a writer whose steadiest love affair has perhaps been with words. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s no incentive to stay with anything. So many bad things happen in this world because people don&amp;#039;t know how to express things.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;s not laughing that lovely throaty laugh now. For just the briefest of instants, a whiff of old Boston pervades this urbane lounge with the jazzy piano music tinkling on the sound system late on this day. Damnation could be just around the carpeted corner. Maybe, though, when you&amp;#039;re a mother, when there is a world your child will soon inherit, maybe the object of your desire shifts. A world with a little subtlety would not be too much to ask for. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a12656/susan-minot-profile/>