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Synopsis

In The Lessons a close-knit group of friends forms at Oxford around the mercurial, charismatic figure of Mark, whose rackety trust-fund upbringing has left him as troubled and dangerously unpredictable as he is wildly promiscuous. After graduation the group fragments, each locked in his or her own suddenly adult, pedestrian world. But Mark's influence is still strong…

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Interview

Naomi Alderman talks to penguin.co.uk about her new novel The Lessons, the trials and tribulations of Oxford and more:

You wrote on your blog that you had to throw out the first 50,000 words of The Lessons and start again from scratch, why was this? Was it a difficult novel to write?
It was difficult, not so much because of the novel itself I think but perhaps because of other things that were going on in my life. I had decided that I'd write a full draft of this new novel before Disobedience was published: I think I pushed myself to write it too quickly, because it came out quite wrong. It was flat and lifeless. Too much polemic, too much opinion, not enough story. It might also have been because I had decided on the whole plot before I started working on the novel: it made me feel safe but it ended up making the book unsurprising to me. I had to learn to surprise myself again.

Plus, I had a whole thing where when I published Disobedience I was an Orthodox Jew and now... I'm not. Which was a major life event, and took some dealing with. It took up some time.

How did it compare with your writing process for Disobedience?
Well, with Disobedience I began work on the novel while I was taking the Creative Writing MA at UEA. So I had that support, and also that feedback on the work as it progressed, which was great. It did mean that I needed to go through a process of getting those voices *out* of my head and beginning to own my book for myself again. The great challenge with Disobedience was simply believing that I could finish a book, that it was worth doing, that I wasn't just wasting my time on it.

For The Lessons, I knew that the novel would be published, so that wasn't such an emotional challenge. The challenge was more in finding a voice for it, in working out how to make the story engaging, and in trying to get the voices of imaginary hostile reviewers out of my head! Erm, not that I spend all my time listening to voices in my head...

You studied Philosophy at Oxford, how did your experience of Oxford compare with James’ experience?
Hmm. I think I did find Oxford pretty intellectually shredding. I met amazing people there, had a lot of fun, had a lot of those 'coming of age' experiences, but was quite startled by the lack of 'tuition'. I mean, I think Oxford would say: what we do is to enable you to learn for yourself. But I'd come from a very nurturing school where a lot of interest was taken in my performance, and I was quite surprised to arrive in Oxford and essentially be given a big reading list and told to go off and learn. I can enjoy that process now, but at the time I found it very difficult. I arrived in Oxford thinking I was pretty intelligent, and left thinking I was pretty stupid. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Was your intention in writing The Lessons, in part, to shatter the ideal and illusions people might have about Oxford?
If I'm honest I think... I wrote it mostly for myself, to shatter my own illusions? I think novels are always for yourself on one level. I wanted to explore it. I wanted to go back, mentally, to work out what happens at Oxford from my position as an adult. I wanted to really examine the mythology and the illusions and try to understand how they affect one's intellectual experience there. James, my narrator, ends up with perhaps the same conclusion as me: "disaster occurs where accidents meet character". It's not about apportioning 'blame' or saying that Oxford is a terrible institution: in fact I think it's in many ways a grand and rather charming institution. But I was trying to understand it, not necessarily to judge.

Mark is a very charismatic and tortured character, does he resemble people you had encountered at Oxford?
Hah. A few. And a few people I've encountered since. It's often the way, I think, that the people who are the life and soul of the party, who are charming, corruscating, hilarious and deadly in conversation are trying to distract attention (their own and other people's) from what's going on inside them. Perhaps a lot of us have been that person sometimes. Easier if you're suffering to try to pretend everything is wonderful than to admit that you're in pain. More dangerous, though, in the long run.

You write the book from a male perspective. Was this something that worried you? Did you get a male friend to check you were getting it right, or do you not see the distinction so much?
I did get a male friend to check! But also, I think it's a novelist's right to do it. The whole point of being a novelist, the whole philosophical import of it, is that actually human beings are not so very different from one another. The idea that by careful imaginative work we can empathise with another human being so closely that we can almost look out at the world through their eyes. How wonderful: and how wonderful that it's possible

Do you think that the Oxford experience is the same for both sexes?
Not being Tiresias, I wouldn't know! My impression is that men don't notice that it's slightly different for women. That's a function of privilege; in the same way that as a white-skinned woman I never have to notice how I'd be treated differently if I were black or Asian. I can choose to turn my attention towards it, if I want to understand other people's experiences, but I don't have a constant reminder of that difference. When I was at Oxford it was 2/3 men, 1/3 women. And said very clearly that it was the best institution in the world and took only the best students. Which rather implies that according to the institutional voice of Oxford, men on average are rather better than women. I think that ratio has changed now, but I can only speak to my experience: these things matter.

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