Alum and Author Myla Goldberg Recalls Oberlin

Meteoric Rise: After leaving Oberlin, Myla Goldberg published her critically acclaimed debut novel Bee Season. (File Photo)

Author Myla Goldberg, OC '96, beat my ass at pinball - not once, but three games in a row. She also managed to reference the smarmy character in her novel Bee Season who introduces the district spelling bee (in a passage she read Thursday night) by quipping, "Pinball isn't a competition. It's a celebration."

"We had such good pinball games," Goldberg said, grinning. "The highlights of my four years of pinball when I was at Oberlin were: Doctor Who, which is an awesome game, Funhouse, that's a really good one too, and Bride of Pinbot. I'm a big pinball fan."

We sat down for a discussion Friday evening in DeCafe which, she informed me, had not changed all that much. "Walking around, I'm actually hallucinating friends of mine," she said, laughing, "I'm seeing people that I swear are the people as I knew them in college. But that could just be a fashion thing."

Goldberg's leap from college to professional success happened quickly. "Writing's all I've ever wanted to do, period," she said, "I just knew from college onward that I'd want to construct a life where I'd be able to write." She spent a year in Prague, living cheaply, teaching English to ex-Communist officials and writing.

"My very first novel - not Bee Season-was written in Prague," she explained, "and after a year I moved to New York." She took a series of jobs, but none worked out, and she was eventually fired from the production of a "Steven King horror movie." This had some unexpected benefits, such as placing her on unemployment for six months, a "dreamy period" that allowed her to finish her first novel. "This was a grant as far as I was concerned," she said, laughing.

"My first novel, about an Eastern European circus at the dawn of World War II," she said, "got me my agent, who sent it around to publishers. After a year and a half of encouraging rejection letters, we decided there was nowhere else to send it. By then I had already started working on Bee Season."

While interning, Goldberg contacted an old boss and got work as a "freelance reader," which involved reading books and deciding whether or not they would make good movies. "I didn't get to do any of the kind of fancy things you do in New York, but it gave me time to write," she said. "If you want to write, choose a job that gives you time rather than money."

How about working as an editorial assistant for some magazine? Goldberg was vehement in her reply.

"That's the worst thing you can possibly do. That's going to use the exact same energies and the exact same part of your brain that you're going to need for writing. You can write on weekends, but that's going to be hard to do if you've already used that part of you up. It's finite."

Then I understood: the trick is to replace the structure of employment with a purer structure, that of writing. As Goldberg described it, writing has much in common with the rituals Aaron, the son in Bee Season, is attracted to in Hare Krishna.

This need for a pure, unencumbered space, then, suggests why so many writers are bothered by the marketing demands put on successful novelists. I wondered if she was distressed that a novel essentially about religion and ritual was being promoted as a book about spelling bees. Not really, she said.

"I'll tell you how I wrote the book," she explained, "I did write it very consciously to get darker and stranger as it continues. I wanted it at first to seem like this sunny, happy Reader's Digest kind of read, and to lull people into this sense of complacency and then to hit them over the head. If the spelling bee gets people to read the book, that's fine with me." But, she said, "there is a difference between how the book is presented and how I'm presented."

Finally, we began talking about the book itself. I asked how the spelling bee fits into the religious themes at the center of Bee Season. I took the bee as a ritual, its emphasis on memorization not so different from Aaron's training for his bar mitzvah.

"That works," Goldberg said. "The idea of ritual was a very important part of the book. We're all enacting rituals, conscious and unconscious. Family is a ritual. There are rules that the family follows, spoken and unspoken. I also wanted to show the way that all of these rituals resemble each other in eerie ways. When Eliza is doing her mystical chanting it's a whole lot like the chanting that Aaron is doing for Hare Krishna. That was very important to me."

Others have commented on the structure of the book. While Eliza clearly is the main character, Goldberg gave equal attention and depth to all four members of the family.

"That was always my interest. Often in books you have the one main character and everyone else is peripheral. I think that's a lot less interesting. I wanted to strive to make everyone as multi-dimensional as possible. The different perspectives and points of view that yields are what make reading interesting."

Is ritual, then, ultimately just an effective way for helping those who are troubled? She paused before replying. "Everyone in the book is looking for something above the banality of daily life. The paths each of them takes are very different. To me, the tragedy of the book is that they don't realize that they're all looking for the same thing. If they had, they maybe could have been a real family.

Ritual can give you a sense of normalcy if you're talking about day-to-day things: we're a family, we eat dinner at a certain time, that's a ritual. The unknown is scary. Structure gives assurance even when there isn't any there."

Back, then, to the ramps and loops of the pinball game. As Myra Goldberg dropped another ball in the grid, the machine screamed out and MULTIBALL! spewed forth. "You can't aim in mutiball," she said, "you just try to keep them in play, and don't worry about where they go." Nailing the flipper button with her double-jointed finger, she got the jackpot again and again. I could only smile and watch.