Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: Zadie Smith "Escape from New York" The New Yorker

“Escape from New York,” your story in this week’s Summer Fiction Issue, is set on September 11, 2001, and features three characters, Michael, Marlon, and Liz, whom we come to realize are Michael Jackson, Marlon Brando, and Elizabeth Taylor. What inspired the story?

I can’t remember exactly when I first read the putative “news story” about Jackson, Brando, and Taylor escaping New York together by car on September 11th—it was many years ago, anyway. I guess it’s just an urban myth, but it has some textual support: the Guardian ran a few versions of it, although the story was explicitly denied by Marlon Brando’s people, I think. If it is purely an urban myth, I love the weird details, especially the fast-food runs. It’s wonderful that we, the people, as a collective, can generate such complex fictions.

The story combines the real and the fictional. You draw on biographical details, for example, but you’re also constructing a fictional account of the movements of Jackson, Brando, and Taylor on September 11th. How did you decide what would be based on fact and what would be pure invention?

I feel like once you’ve put these three in a car together you have a lot of license. They were all so fictional in texture even when they were real and alive on this earth. Also, the writing of the story came about in a strange way, which determined its form: it’s the only story I’ve ever written to avoid writing something else. I was in the middle of writing a long Profile for this very magazine, which I was finding very difficult to structure, and every day I approached my desk with a heavy heart, desperate to find something to do that wasn’t that Profile. I started writing “Escape from New York” at exactly the moment where the deadline for the other thing was getting punishingly close, and the more anxious I became about the deadline the more I cheated on it with a story that nobody had asked for. The joy of “Escape from New York,” for me, was exactly that I didn’t need to do the hours of fact-checking and biographical accuracy the Profile required: I could just work like a fiction writer again. This involved asking myself totally irresponsible questions like, “Well, what do you imagine Brando was like?” And then answering such questions to my own satisfaction. That seemed such a wonderful freedom when compared to: “Using biographical evidence and quotes from transcribed interviews, what kind of person is the subject of this profile?” I was playing hooky!

The story opens with a tragedy, the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11th, yet it’s a comic story in many ways. How did you meld the tragic and comic elements of the story?

One clear connection between the tragic and the comic is narcissism. A deep and poisonous form of narcissism will allow a man to feel he is justified in killing innocent people in the service of his beliefs—and that’s a tragedy. But narcissism takes many forms, some of which are comic. Fame is a comic expression of narcissism. I think the story describes some points on the arc of narcissism, some relatively benign, others utterly deadly.

“Escape from New York” is told from Michael Jackson’s perspective. He’s the man with the plan. In the course of the road trip, we become increasingly aware of his sense of freedom—that this represents a kind of liberation from the burden of being Michael Jackson. Did he ever surprise you as you were writing? Was this the Jackson you expected to discover when you first thought of the story?

Unfortunately, Michael Jackson has always occupied an unhealthily large space in my subconscious—I’m not proud of it. I have a feeling he’s mentioned somewhere in every novel I’ve written, and he’s in the one I’m writing now. So I wasn’t that surprised to find him turn up here again, this time in a sort of “existential hero” form. I think my thing with Michael is that as a very small child I had a lot of contradictory feelings for him, one after the other: first love, then hatred and shame, and then deep pity. I think a lot of black kids of my generation had this experience. It had nothing to do with the pedophile stuff—that all happened when I was grown and didn’t care any more. It had to do with what he did before that, to himself. Everyone’s burdened with a self, with questions concerning freedom and slavery, as they occur within a self, but Jackson dramatized that burden so publically, so brutally. I can remember thinking, as a kid, I wish he could just get some peace. I like that in this story he’s finally found some peace. He’s the Prince of Peace!

Would this be your ideal road trip? If you could put any three people in a car and ride along with them, who would they be?

No, not my ideal road trip. I think it’s a vision of hell. I’m going to squeeze one extra into the back seat and go with a mixture of real and fiction, comedy and wisdom, friendship and eye candy: Zora Neale Hurston—she’s driving—Louis C.K., Virginia Woolf, Jon Snow.