David Foster Wallace said that fiction is “one of the few experiences where

loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.” In our March Web Exclusive story,
“To God Belongs What He Has Taken,” Jensen Beach deftly places us in the mind of a
Stockholm woman caught up in a fantasy about a stranger. It is a subtle and
detailed snapshot of a form of loneliness so universal that, in its confrontation,
we find some relief. We talked with Jensen about how that’s done by writing other
people, other voices, other cultures.

Erin McReynolds: You have a collection of stories coming out soon, of which this
one is a piece. Is there a link between them that we can see in “To God Belongs
What He Has Taken”?

Jensen Beach: The stories are indeed linked. Mainly by character: Marie, her
daughter, her partner Lennart, Lennart’s dead grandfather, and the apartment,
which, I guess, we really only see off stage in this story. Many of the stories in
the book are kind of thinky, in that they are very internal, trying to map or track
thought and the ways in which thought and consciousness are often untethered to
time, or at least loosely tethered to it. That’s always fascinated me in fiction.
Very little happens in the story in the present time, but I enjoyed jumping into
memory and routine in contrast to the quiet narrative present. Many of the stories
do something similar, and maybe this is one of those ridiculous things writers say
about their own work, but I think that process is somewhat paralleled in the ways
the book is linked and interconnected generally.

EM: What’s your connection to the story’s setting in Stockholm?

JB: This isn’t mentioned specifically in the story, but it’s set in the western
suburbs; I lived in Sweden for six years. My wife is Swedish and my kids were born
there. Actually, my daughter was born in Massachusetts, but my sons were born in
Sweden. We lived in—and later outside of—Stockholm. The metro Marie takes is the
same one I used to take into town to work and school. I conflated two stations on
the green line: Blackeberg, closer to the city, is built up higher than the one at
Vällingby, between the apartment blocks, and I remember that station as being
windy, a detail that struck me as right in this story. But the Vällingby is closer
to the shop Marie uses.

EM: Marie’s got her quirks, but she feels familiar: The conflicting desires to
connect and yet harbor someone else’s life as a personal, internal experience. And
the disappointment when she actually makes the attempt! What draws you to this kind
of dynamic, and is it also a theme in the collection?

JB: You know, I started writing the first stories in what would become this book
when I was in graduate school, right after we’d left Sweden and returned to the
U.S. Partly, I think I was trying to come to terms with my own identity as a person
who had adopted, as much as this is possible, another culture. Much of the book
deals with historical events or social realities in Sweden that I wanted to know
more about. So I wrote about Swedish characters, rather than American ones in
Sweden, to explore that to a greater degree. Like Marie, I think I’m interested in
imagining lives for people (and cultures it turns out, yikes!). But in spite of my
interest in this, I recognize its folly; I was drawn to that notion of being
disappointed that your assumptions about another person are wrong. That feels so
enormously selfish but also really human. I think we’re doing this all the time.
Once I had Marie start thinking like this, the idea struck me as one I wanted to
pursue.

EM: Have you identified any interesting differences between writing from the
perspective of born-and-bred Swedes and writing Americans?

JB: This is an interesting question. It’s so hard to generalize, but I guess I know
Swedish-born people less well than I do American ones, so I think maybe I’m more
conscious of the quirks and oddities of personality in a Swedish character. Like I
might find myself thinking, “Is this a cultural particularity?” more often when
writing Swedish characters than American ones. Maybe? I don’t know, there probably
isn’t anything especially Swedish about Marie, nor anything particularly American
about her. She just seems like a person to me. Or like a person I know well. That
is to say, me. I will say, though, that part of the project in the book generally
was to get a closer understanding of Sweden and Swedish culture.

An anecdote I share often is about a historical event that’s not in the book
anymore. In 1993, there was a plane crash in the middle of Stockholm. A SAAB
fighter jet crashed during an airshow. No one was hurt. Which seems sort of
comically Scandinavian, right? Like, even in tragedy, they’re too good to be true!
But what struck me about this is that it happened at a time that I was a young
teenager. I didn’t live in Sweden then, of course. But all of my friends in Sweden
remember this event very well. Many of them were there for it. It’s these small
instances of collective memory that fascinate me as a marker of the ways we’re not
ever really a part of an adopted culture. Those who are outsiders will always lack
something in their culture DNA, or whatever the metaphor is (science!). The book
was my chance to try to look at that—mainly for me, of course, but I hope it
resonates with readers, too. In this story, I’m not sure that’s so much at play—
though there are cultural indicators that might be worth pointing out in terms of
geography, or the ways in which Marie and the woman interact, the lack of
understanding for the religious or spiritual elements present in the way the shop
employee responds to Ahmed’s death, and so on.

EM: What have you been reading/inspired by lately?

JB: Ordinarily I don’t read a ton for pleasure during busy teaching times. I
should, but I find it difficult. Luckily I teach a lot of courses that I can design
around things I’m interested in, books I want to read. This semester I’m teaching
Peter Stamm, Yoko Ogawa, Tove Jansson, Joy Williams, and that Ben Marcus-edited New
American Stories anthology. There’s enough in there to inspire me every day!