Bookmarked: "The Sensualist"

The teenager's beguiling landscape of impending, irreversible disaster is the setting for Daniel Torday's novella The Sensualist (Nouvella, 2012), which was awarded the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for Outstanding Debut Fiction last week. Torday, who directs the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr College and lives in Mount Airy, joins a list of past prize winners for debut fiction that includes Peter Orner, Nathan Englander, Lara Vapnyar, and Gary Shteyngart.

The Sensualist is a pretty little package of a book that feels more like a prayer collection than the bruising story of a teenager's confrontation with viciousness and sex. But that's part of the point, I think: The tiniest thing can rupture a teenager's life.

The protagonist/narrator Samuel Gerson is a fairly sheltered 15-year-old who lives at the suburban edge of Baltimore. His life turns on befriending the Russian Jewish refugee Dmitri and his sister Yelizaveta. With not too much work he gets Yelizaveta into bed.

"There was something violent in seeing her this way for the first time. Her left breast was slightly bigger than the right. The space between her hips and her shoulders was a bit too long, making her body appear disproportionate in a way that made me aroused and nauseated."

Samuel's life turns on this moment. He's conscious of the danger, certainly, but is completely unaware all the same.

I caught up with Torday last week on his way to accept the award in New York for additional insight into his book.


Nathaniel Popkin: The book plays most commandingly on the line between a child's normal, safe life and the impending disaster that can change everything from that point forward (the cops, getting a girl pregnant, failing school, etc). Most of the time, even in disaster, it works out like it did for Samuel—only a bruising. But what's his transformation and why's it so important to you?

Daniel Torday: One of my biggest influences is Philip Roth. "My characters are busy at the business of choosing," he says. There's something so dramatic in his books that he gets out of giving his characters those big choices. But there's also a way in which so much gets chosen for us in life—by chance, by our station, by forces beyond our control. I don't know if it was conscious, but those are definitely ideas that were affecting Sam in this book. He came out okay—he came out better than Dmitri. But he didn't come out unscathed. No one does when something goes so horribly wrong.

NP: The other line the book plays on is urban-suburban and you emphasize this with the visual metaphor of the highway noise barrier.

DT: A big part of what interested me in writing the book was the way in which a character like Dmitri had his experience as an immigrant, a first-generation American, play out in a cloistered setting like the suburb where the book is set. The way the tensions and frustrations of coming to a new country and starting fresh would play out not in the anonymity of a large city, but under the watchful eye of a smaller community. I'd guess that a century ago most immigration played out in cities. And I think the violence and the strife that characterizes itself here comes in Dmitri just being watched, being somewhere where people could track his development so closely.

NP: This is a Jewish novel because the characters are Jews and fairly well understood or well acknowledged Jewish American archetypes. But I suspect it feels like a Jewish novel for you for other reasons. Can you explain?

DT: There are the more overt markers: there's a Passover Seder, and Pikesville is a self-identified Jewish neighborhood. And the action of the book is precipitated by Dmitri's being a Muscovite Jew: His family has been sponsored to come to Baltimore, and it's allowed for his immigration. There's not a whole lot of theology or piety or prayer or observation of ritual elsewhere in its pages—and yet I suppose there's a kind of Old Testament God presiding over it, too, a God wrathful and unforgiving, if that doesn't sound too grandiose. At bottom, I definitely think of myself as more culturally Jewish than anything—I don't keep Kosher, only attend shul on the High Holidays, if then. We have Seders, though. And I have a certain affinity for all that wrathfulness and unforgivingness.

NP: It must be very exciting to win a literary award, especially given who else has won this one.

DT: I got the call literally four days after our new daughter, Delia, was born. My editor called, and [because] we mostly email… I thought, "Oh, that's so nice she's calling to say congrats about the baby!" And she said, "Congratulations!" And for about three minutes I thought we were talking about the baby. Until finally she said, "You don't know, do you?" And I said, "What?" And she said, "You won the National Jewish Book Award!" And it's still sinking in. You spend so much time as a writer developing thick skin, learning to accept rejection and bad news, it's like you can't even understand the good news if it finally does come.

NP: What's next?

DT: I've just about finally completed the long novel I've been at for almost a decade. It's provisionally called Poxl, and it's the fictional memoir of a Czech Jewish teenager who's forced to leave his home north of Prague just before the outbreak of WWII, and who ends up flying bombers for the RAF after a time in Rotterdam. While he's in Holland he falls in love with a Dutch prostitute, who he tries to track down later, after he's injured on a sortie. The book also takes up his young cousin in Boston in the 1980s, who tells the story of the reception of the memoir.

You can purchase The Sensualist now on Amazon.