In Conversation with Willa Cather

Willa Cather's novels do not behave like other novels. Indeed, her art is famously uncategorizable. She is not much interested in plots; she works instead by juxtaposition, leaving it up to the reader to feel the vibrations between one situation and another. Nor is she interested in creating consistent character in the usual sense; her people are quite fluid as they appear and reappear in different phases of their stories. But she is deeply interested in the long-term trajectory of lives.

Written back and forth in dialogue between Rosemarie Bodenheimer and Philip Davis, this innovative book explores the many ways that Willa Cather's radical originality is quietly manifest, without fanfare or explanation. Nearing middle age when she began her life as a novelist, Willa Cather thought of lives as long arcs of change, in which success and failure are equally fraught, and one might shift quickly into the feeling of the other. Bodenheimer and Davis discover and celebrate Cather's subtle shifts of mood and perspective, as they appear in her numinous landscapes of light, and are registered in her characters' minds. Working within her own terms, In Conversation with Willa Cather puts the odd shapes and silences of her books in conversation with her letters, interviews, and other writings about the art of fiction.