00:11:39.380it doesn't really get you that far because it's the actual writing that is everything is going
00:11:47.240to make or break the book got you uh as promised i'm going to now try to link it link your world
00:11:53.680of fictional writing with my world in evolutionary psychology so there is a field uh called darwinian
00:12:00.700literary criticism are you at all familiar with that term no i'm not i'm okay oh great so i'm
00:12:07.800always excited when i sort of introduce a new a new concept to a guest so darwinian literary
00:12:12.700criticism basically argues and i think it's going to resonate well with you it basically argues that
00:12:18.400the reason why fictional literature titillates our senses engages our imagination is because
00:12:26.860ultimately it is a window to our evolved human nature so if you look if you do a content analysis
00:12:33.540of all great literature whether it be some japanese formed 500 years ago or some urdu story
00:12:41.620from pakistan or some arabic story there is a few universal themes that we are absolutely sure
00:12:48.780are going to pull at our strings in exactly the same way irrespective of when you're reading it
00:12:54.620or where you're reading it which temporal period paternity uncertainty sexual longing sibling
00:13:00.100rivalry parent child you know parent offspring conflicts and so there's a few of these templates
00:13:06.180but then can be delivered in completely different ways but underneath all that difference lays those
00:13:12.580lay those universals so well first what do you what do you think of that because what do you
00:13:17.940think of that theory trying to link sort of the natural sciences to an art form like literature
00:13:23.300i think there's something sound in that um
00:13:27.260I am probably best known as a novelist who takes on contemporary social issues, which I have not done in every book and do not feel obligated to do in every book.
00:13:45.900But yes, my work tends to be a little more political than a lot of my contemporaries.
00:16:01.080Right. And I would say if you write a narrative in your fictional work that is inconsistent or incongruent with human nature, it will likely fail.
00:16:14.460And so let me let me just give you one or two examples off the top of my head. So I remember in my first book, it was an academic book where I was doing a content analysis of various cultural products, art, film, you know, literature, poetry, song lyrics.
00:16:33.260I said, well, look, if you look at the types of things that male singers sing about versus female singers in wildly different time periods across wildly different linguistic heritage, it's never the women that are more likely to be singing about the beauty of men.
00:16:56.640it's always the women who are going to be denigrating the social status of a man that's
00:17:02.200how you denigrate a man so there are certain again to our earlier point certain universal themes so
00:17:07.840take for example i don't know if you remember the the movie with uh demi moore and robert
00:17:14.180redford indecent proposal do you remember that movie i don't i don't remember it yeah okay so
00:17:22.420it was I think I hope I'm not remind me yeah so I think it was 1993 maybe it's a movie about a rich
00:17:29.600industrialist a dashing guy Robert Redford uh who uh meets this young sort of idealistic couple
00:17:38.440our love will conquer everything played by Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore and as they're chatting
00:17:44.520while playing you know pool in some you know bar uh they intimate to him that there are some things
00:17:51.220that can't be bought and so he decides to put this to the test by proposing an indecent proposal
00:17:57.660which is i'll give you a million dollars if i could have a night with your wife now of course
00:18:05.360that creates a huge tension and but the screenwriters who wrote that while they may not
00:18:12.200call themselves evolutionary psychologists are actually darwinian beings that understand what
00:18:17.680resonates in their minds and in the minds of the audience which is if it were the opposite if it
00:18:23.420were oprah winfrey that meets the couple and we and then she says to the wife give me a million0.94
00:18:30.200i'll give you a million dollars if you can go with your husband the wife is certainly more likely to0.99
00:18:35.600say here's the check here's the zurich bank account and don't let the door hit your asses0.98
00:18:42.020on the way out right now not not because women you know don't mind uh you know infidelity but the0.99
00:18:48.500the psychic pain of sexual infidelity looms much larger in a man's psyche if only because of
00:18:56.640paternity uncertainty we know so men have evolved the cognitive behavioral emotional system to thwart
00:19:03.780the greatest threat to them which is we're a bi-parental species i don't want to be investing0.86
00:19:08.44018 years and a baby that turns out to look like the really sexy gardener that used to come to our
00:19:14.040house and so literature film what you write about if you're doing a good job i read that and i go
00:19:21.760that resonates with exactly what i expect humans to act like does that make sense yes and and and
00:19:30.120novelists are always also exploring the violation of of those rules and the you
00:19:42.040know Kevin famously the mother doesn't love her son I mean that's against the
00:19:48.280rules that's against evolutionary rules and in fact it tends to break standard
00:19:55.180narrative rules that's just that the mother-son relationship is sacred and i violated that so
00:20:02.180novels experiment with breaking the darwinian rules but of course by the end of the novel
00:20:11.040they have reconciled so you break the rule in order to verify the rule interesting what's your
00:20:19.520typical, you know, regiment when you're writing. So in my case, for example, I mean, there are
00:20:25.600many sort of principles that I might use, but certainly I'm very dogged and disciplined in that
00:20:32.740it becomes very easy for me, you know, I lead a, you know, a busy life, as I'm sure you do,
00:20:37.780for me to say, well, maybe not today, I don't have to write. But no, every single day, I could
00:20:42.820be suffering from a nasty bronchitis i'm going to sit down and try to you know uh go through
00:20:49.840200 300 400 words do you have such mechanisms that you sort of try to abide by so that you can
00:20:58.480get harper collins that book on time um no really you're free if i have a book on i try to get to it
00:21:09.300If I can't, for whatever reason, don't freak out.
00:21:17.720I tend, you know, when I first started out, I was very rigid and I had rules
00:21:24.560and I had word counts that I had to meet.
00:21:28.740That's fundamentally fearful and expresses a lack of faith in yourself.
00:21:33.600and after that many books uh i have faith in my ability to get the job done sooner or later so
00:21:41.160no no it's not i'm fairly relaxed about the whole thing do you like to work uh and i mean i'm asking
00:21:52.220these questions because i know for a fact that there are you know everybody is an aspiring actor
00:21:57.040aspiring author even if they've never written anything right so they are more and more importantly
00:22:02.500everyone is an aspiring writer, even if they never read anything.
00:22:05.860Fair enough. So it's in that spirit that, you know, I want the people who are listening to us
00:22:11.980and certainly the people who want to write fiction. I'm sitting and chatting with someone
00:22:15.800who's done it very well for many years. You know, I'm speaking as you now. I like to work with music
00:22:22.440in the background. Or no, it has to be completely quiet. I like to work in my cave in my study. Or
00:22:27.780no i need to get out and be in a cafe give us a sense of you know where it is that you can paint
00:22:34.560your canvas in an optimal manner i i do better it in my study i don't tend to write in hotel rooms
00:22:43.240fair enough uh what about we were talking earlier uh because you said hotel room so it made me think
00:22:51.200of travel I know that you live partly in Portugal a few years ago my family and I for the first time
00:22:59.680ever went to the Algarve kind of covered almost all of it the whole coast loved it what made you
00:23:06.720decide to go to that enchanting country we had friends who moved here in advance and scoped it
00:23:15.620out. So we already had a small ready-made social circle. And I was ready to leave the UK where I
00:23:26.400had lived for 36 years. So some of it was negative. It was a sense that the UK was in a state of
00:23:35.920profound decay and I didn't have to go down with the ship. That explains by the way, I think I
00:23:44.200hadn't coded that you lived in the UK that explains why you you and I pronounced the word
00:23:49.920I-S-S-U-E very differently I noticed that you pronounced it in a more British manner and I was
00:23:56.780kind of confused yeah that's right it we I wouldn't say it this way right my pronunciation
00:24:01.420is not nearly as screwed up as it really should be but uh by screwed up it means more British
00:24:09.080Um, yes, it should be more British than it is, but we both know that Americans detest other Americans who adopt English accents.0.66
00:24:21.420So I don't know how conscious it was, but I more or less resolved to resist putting on airs as our compatriots would perceive them and have kept my American accent with some resolution.
00:24:49.100And I think that was, I think that is an expression of self-respect.
00:25:08.600It took me a long time to get over that.
00:25:11.020But I finally decided, and it was a conscious decision to bring back my original accent, I thought that the adoption of some of the local lilt was an expression of a desire to please.
00:25:41.020Yes. Tell me, I was looking through some of the material, and I think one of the topics that you were more than happy to talk about, and I can understand why, is sort of the wokeism, you know, parasitic stuff that's in the publishing industry.
00:25:56.680I can imagine when you're writing a book that in one form or another is anti-open immigration policy
00:26:04.080I can imagine how many you know publishers would huff and puff at the audacity of saying that
00:26:09.880not everyone should be equally welcome and so on but is this something that you've been experiencing
00:26:14.760I mean throughout your career where you may have a political bent that's somewhat to the right of
00:26:22.660the typical publisher and that you've had to deal with? And if yes, maybe you can tell us about how
00:26:27.000you navigated that. My orientation politically probably started splitting off from the more
00:26:40.280acceptable progressive path, especially around 2010 or so. And I think you can see that in the
00:26:49.900work. I was raised as a liberal Democrat and my transformation into what I have finally resolved
00:26:59.660to call conservatism was gradual. Although living in Northern Ireland was
00:27:12.340a big contribution because liberal Democrats at that time, and this was during the trouble
00:27:19.820were big supporters of the IRA, and as soon as I got to Belfast,
00:27:24.840I found the IRA completely repulsive, morally and also personally.
00:27:31.940So that classed me in the context of that conflict more conservative.
00:27:40.660But it has been tricky to navigate publishing and literary circles as one of the only conservative fiction writers in the Western world, as far as I can tell.
00:28:01.480I mean, you can name some others. I'd love to meet them.
00:28:05.840Try to meet a conservative professor. It's even less likely.
00:30:48.040I mean, that is, it's a good discipline.
00:30:53.720So there are a lot of arguments about immigration in this book, but both sides have to be well-argued.
00:31:02.620I can't stack the deck too much or, you know, I show my hand and therefore I come across as a propagandist.
00:31:14.040propagandist right in fact that's one of the big differences again between non-fiction and
00:31:18.580in fiction because in non-fiction you're expected to have a line that you're hawking
00:31:24.400but in fiction you're not really supposed to be having a non-fiction line that you're hawking
00:31:30.760um maybe in relation to those deep waters we were talking about right that would be okay
00:31:40.320that you have a perspective on romantic love or something and but not that you want to
00:31:51.440to eliminate the asylum system you can't you know that's just not going to fly artistically
00:32:02.300Right. And, and, but it's also a little tricky when, when I, you know, one of my ambitions is, was to explore the immigration issue. I find it fascinating. I've been interested in immigration for at least 30 years.
00:32:18.480i was i was thinking as when when you started your answer you were saying you know i'm one of
00:32:24.140the only if not the i guess not the only but one of the only conservative fiction writers i was
00:32:30.040thinking in other genres where we would have a similar reality and so i thought about when i
00:32:35.700first moved to canada we moved from lebanon in the mid-70s and one of the shows that i think
00:32:42.080shaped me very early on which was very much of a political show where a sitcom one of the
00:32:50.120characters was very conservative although you may not want to claim him because he was somewhat
00:32:55.360spicy in some of his bigotry do you know do you know where i'm going with this do you know which
00:32:59.560show i'm thinking of let's see if we're simpatico here there used to be a comedy in the early to
00:33:06.120mid-70s, where really the underlying current was always about social issues. Any thoughts that
00:33:13.600come to mind? This is a second city? I was going to say all in the family. So all in the family.
00:33:18.860Yeah, I loved all in the family. Right. So all in the family. I mean, when I was a kid, I mean,
00:33:24.460yes, I understood it, but at a certain level, right? I was 11, 12, having recently come to
00:33:30.580the United States learning English, when I've seen subsequently clips from it, you know, it deals
00:33:37.140with many issues that are eternal, right? That are as relevant today. Now, the way that they deliver
00:33:43.360the dialogue might be considered incredibly risque today, but it's still dealing with the
00:33:49.500same issues. So it seems as though really like in every possible artistic endeavor, as is the case
00:33:56.880in academia, you could count on one hand the number of conservatives. So in journalism,
00:34:02.780in film, in television, in fiction writing, everywhere. Why do you think that is? Why do
00:34:09.220you think all the intelligentsia, I mean, I've got, of course, my own answers, but I'd like to
00:34:14.260hear yours. Why is it so astoundingly tilted to the left? I find it a little puzzling. I have some
00:34:24.220answers, but I don't think they're sufficient. I think conservatives tend to be more practical
00:34:31.140in terms of just their choices of profession. And the arts are a bad bet in general. I mean,
00:34:44.680my career has ended up being successful in the end, but it wasn't for a long time.
00:34:54.980And my parents' concerns about my choice of career were well-founded. I was insulted by
00:35:03.440those concerns to begin with. And now as an older and more mature adult, I am very sympathetic
00:35:56.260But why would creative people as a class be left-wing?
00:36:06.040I can propose something. And I mean, there are several possible mechanisms, but one of which to sort of build on what you just said, I think that leftist folks wake up every day with an existential angst about the current reality, the status quo, right?
00:36:25.980they live in an evil capitalist society that's islamophobic transphobic misogynistic
00:36:32.460living on stolen land and so on around the corner lays unicornia so if only we can you know get rid0.98
00:36:41.880i like that unicornia you like that uh so if we can get rid of the current status quo
00:36:47.880then we can create that beautiful world that really we we are all deserving of and one of
00:36:54.240the ways by which I can instantiate my journey to unicornia is through the arts, where I'm not
00:37:02.800restricted. I could be fully decoupled from reality while I spin all of my ideological
00:37:10.260bullshit. I think that might be one possible explanation. What do you think?0.99
00:37:16.700But it speaks to your point about practicality, right? That you said that,
00:37:20.180And by the way, you see that. Sorry, I interrupted before I gave you a chance to answer the previous comment. You see it, for example, in the distribution of political orientations within medicine.
00:37:32.660So the orthopedic surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the urologist, if memory serves me right,
00:37:44.360very practical, just you got to fix the Achilles tendon, you've got to administer the right amount
00:37:50.480of anesthesia given this person's sex and weight. It's very practical. It's very clear.
00:37:56.780there isn't the intrusion of ideology the most leftist fields infectious disease pediatrics and0.60
00:38:04.820psychiatry have a much greater degrees of freedom for ideological bullshit to come in and so i think
00:38:12.780that might explain what we're talking about um there it may also be an ingredient that
00:38:20.220conservatives tend to be more contented yeah exactly and actually the research supports what
00:38:26.620you're saying, because in my previous book, in my happiness book, I discuss the ubiquity of
00:38:35.420research that has found that conservatives score higher on happiness than do the progressives,
00:38:42.840to your point. Yes, and it's a significant difference. Yeah, indeed. And there may be
00:38:49.280something about being drawn to the arts that suggests a an angst or a desire to resolve
00:38:59.160something yeah indeed that uh that if you're truly contented you're not tortured in that way
00:39:05.980and you don't you don't need to create something to sort something out because everything's fine
00:39:13.340or at least maybe not perfect but i i mean i wake up every morning i say i've got a great family i've
00:39:20.580got a great profession i live in the freest society possible it's not perfect but i'm not
00:39:26.300you know painting my hair blue and going to free palestine rallies right because to your point i
00:39:32.160am content i live in a great society i'm happy i've got existential gratitude uh i want to go
00:39:38.240back to uh fiction uh quickly uh in your in this book let me put it up again so that people could
00:39:45.520go get it better life came out a few months ago go get it people uh you said that eric adams had
00:39:52.720you know was trying to enact some policy hey invite people into your home because we want to
00:39:59.000be kind and empathetic so that might have been the trigger for the eventual book is it always
00:40:05.140that mechanism for all your books. You see something that happens in society and then you
00:40:11.140say, aha, I think I just found the topic of my next book. And if, if yes, okay, great. If not,
00:40:16.560how do you come up? What's, what's your next book going to be about? Or do you not know it yet?
00:40:22.780Yeah, I know it. But you don't talk about it. No, not really. I'm struggling with it.
00:40:29.580I've wanted to write a novel about immigration for a long time
00:40:36.120but having a topic is not having an idea for a book
00:40:40.740so it was only when I heard about Eric Adams
00:41:26.880OK, I was going to I was going to try. Usually when I end my conversations, I say, if you've got anything to plug like a next project, this is your time to do it.
00:41:35.600But you said you don't want to discuss your the next book that's simmering in your mind.
00:41:40.560Is there anything else that you would like to share with us, plug, promote other than this guy right here?
00:41:50.040No, I'm promoting that book. It's my job right now.
00:41:53.820And I would just say that fiction writers have written about immigration for many, many years, but they almost always tell the story from the perspective of the immigrant.
00:42:08.840and this is one of the only books i know of that takes account of the experience of the host
00:42:16.980population what it's like to be in a place that is being inundated with strangers from somewhere
00:42:24.960else and it is a novel that is sympathetic with that experience even if it sometimes rouses
00:42:33.740unattractive emotions like resentment and consternation.
00:42:41.560But I think that most of the United States
00:42:48.260falls into the category of the characters in my book.