SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
"Mule Boy" is a novel told in what may look like one long, searing sentence. Picking up on New Year's Day, 1929, when Ondro Prach, 13-year-old son of Slovak immigrants, begins work as what's called a mule boy in a Pennsylvania coal mine. That very day, there is a collapse in the mine, and Ondro survives, but does he ever recover? Andrew Krivak, the author and National Book Award finalist, joins us now. Thank you so much for being with us.
ANDREW KRIVAK: Thank you, Scott. Appreciate the invitation.
SIMON: Let me ask you to read from your book to take us into this world of the mine.
KRIVAK: Sure. (Reading) And when the miner had brought to the surface all the coal he was expected to mine in a day, he went home, back to the patch to see his wife and his family and to take a bath and to eat his supper. And though the mines were dirty, they were no dirtier than a shop floor or a tannery or railyard, and no miner stayed dirty longer than was necessary. The miner worked, but he knew his business, and his business was what lay beneath the earth, and the earth took good care of him if he worked. And John Chibala and Stefan Bozak filled that train of three cars in what might have been two hours or so. Wickett (ph) and I pulled them away and onto the gangway and down the tracks.
SIMON: It's a tough way to make a living. And Ondro knows the dangers from his own family, doesn't he?
KRIVAK: He does, yes. His father died the same way my grandfather died, my father's father, in 1927, in a collapse. What I wanted to do was to think about what my grandfather might have been through, both in the act of coal mining and then in the collapse that essentially took his life.
SIMON: I was struck by the line when one of the miners tells Ondro, God may speak Latin, but the angel speaks Slovak.
KRIVAK: Yeah.
SIMON: This was a community of immigrants, building America, wasn't it?
KRIVAK: It's true, yes. I mean, I am the grandson of immigrants who were coal miners. They were miners. The miners, and as I say, in the novel, too, they were just - you just didn't pull them off the street. They were made. They knew where to put the dynamite. They knew where the good seams were. And they paid their buddies. They paid the mule boy. And, you know, as my mother used to say, that her father would say, you know, I'd rather do this, and I'm really good at it. So it was not easy work, but this is what these men did.
SIMON: Tell us about this trio that is caught together in the collapse - John Chibala, Stefan Bozak and a mule named Wickett, who becomes his own character.
KRIVAK: So John Chibala and Stefan Bozak, I think I had to have the miners down there. They were the men doing the work and their two buddies. And the mule boy was almost a way in which I could get the character of Ondro Prach in there and have him move around, give him the job to do. And so the trio, essentially, they know their work. And the mules were more valuable than the mule boys, and also pretty hard to take care of. And so I wanted Ondro Prach and Wickett the mule to have that relationship, which is slightly more than, you know, than men to boys. He understands the mule because the two of them both have had hard lives.
SIMON: We hear Ondro's story, of course, because he survives and is able to go on. But as he grows up, are there ghosts walking through his life?
KRIVAK: The ghosts are there all the time. The novel actually takes place in the 24-hour period in which Ondro Prach is an old man in a place far away from the Pennsylvania mines. He's living in a house in New Hampshire. And it's this stream of consciousness, call it what you will. I wanted to get as close as I could to storytelling as an oral storytelling rather than as a written one. So the entire book is almost a meditation, if you will, of Ondro Prach thinking about all those people who have come to him over the years to ask, what did you do? What did you fail to do? And it's the one day where he's thinking this through, waiting for the one person that he really wants to come, waiting for her to show up. I mean, all my life, I heard stories about the mines from my grandmothers. I never met my grandfathers, but I feel like I knew them my entire life. And so...
SIMON: Of course, your Aunt Genevieve.
KRIVAK: My Aunt Genevieve, yes. She's the last of my father's siblings - 95. And she is the same way. She was six months in my grandmother's belly when her father died. And she has said that, I never met my father, but I knew him my entire life through the stories. And really, I'm only a writer because of the stories I heard from my grandmothers.
SIMON: I refer to it as one long sentence, which is not only technically wrong, but maybe forbidding. On the other hand, you open the book. That's what it looks like. What is it in your mind?
KRIVAK: I don't really have a word for what I'm trying to do. What I want to do is try to approximate the breadth of oral storytelling. I wondered, how would this look if I just use commas throughout the novel, in which essentially Ondro Prach was inhaling and exhaling as he told his story?
SIMON: Is Ondro consumed by what we would now maybe call a mixture of gratitude and survivor's guilt?
KRIVAK: I think gratitude comes at the end. Yes, at the end of the story, the evening, finally. You know, Aristotle said tragedy should happen in a 24-hour period. Survivor's guilt, I think, is why he's struggled so hard his whole life. But in that other mountainous place, well, I hope the only thing that comes across is that he is living a life of gratitude because he realized that he's had to live this life in order to tell the story of those who have not survived as long as he has.
SIMON: And as we note, the trauma is inescapable. He drinks too much. He loses more.
KRIVAK: Right.
SIMON: But he finds solace in the book of Jonah and Shakespeare. What does he find there?
KRIVAK: He starts reading Shakespeare when he's in college, studying engineering because that's what he was supposed to do, and he hears of plays in which men and women struggle, and he thinks, yes, I know what that is like. And in the book of Jonah, Jacobson, the man he's in prison with who teaches him Hebrew because he's got time. That's all they've got is time. And you could think of this as a retelling of the Jonah story, but I've always wondered about that lack of ending at the ending of the very short Jonah story. Ondro is there as well, underneath his tree, understanding, but still not yet understanding.
SIMON: You know, early in my repertorial career, I did stories with miners when mines were closing, and they were mad. They lost what were good-paying jobs and also their lives and livelihoods, and I think what we'd now call their sense of identity. I want to respect the loss they felt. But reading your book did not make me regret that the mining industry has diminished.
KRIVAK: You know, my grandfathers miss the work they did. I've been down in mines, and I felt oddly a strange comfort in there. And I got a sense of understanding what work they did. But at the same time, it killed them, killed them both. And not just them, but hundreds of thousands of men. So I would let that doubleness sit there.
SIMON: Andrew Krivak, his new novel "Mule Boy." Thank you so much for being with us.
KRIVAK: Thank you, Scott. Appreciate it. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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