Making the Natives Restless 
An Interview with novelist Heidi Julavits on her Pueblo-based novel, The Mineral Palace
by David Keplinger
As the first wave of hate mail began to pour in, novelist Heidi Julavits wasn’t thrown. Her book, The Mineral Palace (Putnam, 2000), set in Pueblo in 1934, clearly has its issues. The tale of a Minnesota debutante who, with her doctor husband, relocates to a small Colorado town in the midst of the Depression, The Mineral Palace flaunts its share of adultery, snobbery, prostitution, even infanticide.
But she was surprised—miffed—when she discovered that few of her detractors even mentioned those controversies. The great majority written by older, former residents of Pueblo, Colorado, the letters took offense to her use of their very real town in a story at best only loosely based on fact. And they reprimanded the young writer for her misinformation.
“They scolded me that this street didn’t intersect with that street,” Julavits writes in a January, 2002 column for Poets and Writersmagazine, “that the sort of events I claimed went on inside their defunct, now-razed museum—namely the actions of my made-up characters—never happened.
“They alerted me to the fact that they were actively trying to persuade their local libraries to ban my book and urging everyone in Pueblo to refuse to buy it—not because I had written a book about infanticide, but because I had behaved in a factually liberal manner and, moreover, characterized their town as dreary and desolate.”
The scandal her novel has provoked is, in one sense, deserved. If we are to judge The Mineral Palace as historical fiction—a term Julavits herself cringes at, preferring to call the story a mythic novel— then she’s defied history, defied the facts: her Pueblo is a mining town; her Arkansas River runs south, through Trinidad.
Since the novel’s debut, critics and fans of Julavits’ work have bumped heads over how to—or whether one should—read a historical novel as a work of art. Can historical fact be sacrificed for the sake of art?
Historian Jonathon Rees at the University of Southern Colorado read the book but was not transported, he claims, because of its lack of period details. “If you want to read a book about infanticide,” says Rees, “this is a pretty good one. If you want to read a book about a western town during the 1930s, this is not the book for you.”
Ultimately, it is the individual reader’s preference –history over art or vice versa—that will determine their enjoyment of such a novel. Outside of Pueblo, The Mineral Palace has reaped praise for its gripping narrative and its author’s knack for dialogue and metaphor. Those readers seem to be paying little attention to hard, factual details about the Pueblo of that period.
Should they? Most readers of literary fiction say no.
Those opposed to Rees and the former Puebloans upset at the historical liberties Julavits takes will also probably not scour the narratives of Homer or Sophocles’ Oedipus for concrete details about ancient Troy or Thebes. They prefer not to search texts for specific anthropological details that will indicate street maps, popular pastimes, or tidbits on the fashion trends of Greece and its environs, circa 800 B.C.E. These works are read for their metaphorical value, as they apply to our lives today.
In her column, Julavits fully admits that she “utilized facts not as a stabilizing substructure, but as a source of inspiration from which an enhanced fictional world could be built from the ground up.”
But Professor Rees, and others like him, who emphasize the informational value of the prose, fail to be convinced. “It affected my enjoyment of the book a significant amount,” he says of the book’s lack of hard, factual resources. “The dialogue is engaging and the characters are extremely well-developed. I think Julavits is a very good writer, but I also think if she wants to do fiction set in an historical setting again, she needs to do a lot more research.”
Very good, and lucky. At thirty years old, Heidi Julavits’ life had been transformed after a series of serendipities that put her in contact first with a journal editor, then an agent, then a publishing house, all of whom saw in her work-in-progress the vitality and courage of a real thing. Before the novel was finished, she had already landed a two-book deal with Putnam, a feat almost as impressive as the writing itself.
Certainly, to her New York agent and to her editor, the late Faith Sale, Julavits’ choice to set the novel in Pueblo was no scandal. To those who saw her novel as a work of art and a good investment, Julavits might have set her story in Kalamazoo.
She recalls that she set The Mineral Palace in the southeastern Colorado city because Bena, the story’s protagonist, shared a lot of similarities with her late grandmother. Like Bena, Julavits’ grandmother had come to Pueblo on the eve of having her first child with her doctor husband. Like Bena, she had hated Pueblo. But there, Julavits insists, the similarities end between the two.
“Everybody has got to find an autobiographical hinge,” she says of her readers, blaming that in part on the fact that she’s a woman writer. “When you’re a woman, you don’t get asked about the book, you get asked about your personal life.”
Having dealt with her share of reporters since the novel’s publication, Julavits has found that her interviewers seem less concerned with her treatment of the issues than with how she came to be invested in them.
“The unspoken conclusion,” she tells me, “is that women are emotional and confessional…women make their mark on literature by spilling their guts, it’s assumed, whereas men are more into universal concerns.”
Now under fire by those who know she could not have lived in the “real” Pueblo of 1934, she has found herself growingly perturbed at the assumption that a young woman might lack the insight to fully imagine a time and place which she did not experience first hand.
She’d had little exposure to Pueblo before she began writing, she admits. In 1996 she visited the town for five days, staying at the Baxter bed-and-breakfast downtown, within walking distance of Mineral Palace Park, where, in 1934, an actual “palace” had stood, in ruins, at the center of the park. It has long since been razed. In the course of her research, she kept in close contact with the Pueblo Historical Society and the librarians at the Pueblo Public Library.
Her most invaluable companion, however, was a 90-year-old Pueblo resident named Red Hart Withers, a rancher, who had lived in Pueblo during the period in which her novel was to be placed.
Julavits describes Withers as “a resource as valuable as going to the library,” and the back of his car “an archive,” in which they went on long drives through the region. During those hours together, they simply talked about his experiences in the town 60 years before.
The novel traces the experiences of Bena Johnson through her first year in town. We learn of the strange listlessness of her baby, Little Ted, and the growing distance between Bena and her husband, Ted senior. Through the course of the year, Bena acquires a job at The Pueblo Chieftain as a kind of social page editor, coming into close contact with the upper circles of town. She meets Reimer Lee Jackson, a leader among the many women’s organizations and well established as a member of the Pueblo elite, but whose strange idiosyncrasies include a leg mauled in childhood and replaced with an artful but damaging, heavy ivory prosthetic.
Prosthetics—if we can include in that category whatever serves as substitute for emotional and physical loss—haunt the novel. In the lives of each of these characters, something has gone missing, something which they desperately try to hide from the world. Tragically, it’s their reluctance to accept their losses that damages them all the more. Both Bena and Ted find their own “prosthetic” substitutes—an outside relationship— to satisfy what is lacking in their marriage.
One of the sole characters to acknowledge his imperfections is Red Grissom, a rancher sharing the first name of Julavits’ original guide in Pueblo. The real challenge that all of the characters face, some unsuccessfully, is how to accept what Julavits calls “the powerlessness” of their situations; that is, how to fully face the truth and survive.
She claims that the process of writing became more complicated as, after years of work on the story, the fact checker at Putnam began to ask questions about the names of characters and places in the novel. “I could no longer remember, when asked, which details were factual and which were purely fictional,” she revealed in her Poets and Writers column.
But the truly difficult road was still awaiting her. “How really hard it is to have a book come out,” she says, “how draining it is. It’s not satisfying, no matter what happens.
“You have the realization that the pleasure of writing is writing.” When approached after her readings in this region, she finds that many are still critical of her research. “It’s jarring when you realize in getting published,” she says, “that the pleasurable part has already happened to you.”
Now finishing her second novel, Pitkairn’s Mistake, Julavits insists that she is much more conscious of “the pleasurable part” and less of the ends. She writes full time. But like many novelists, she finds that judging her work on her own terms is still very difficult. “I had more self esteem when I was waiting tables,” she says of her present life, the hate mail, the New York writing scene, and writing in general.
“You’d go to work and people would tell you, ‘You’re a great waitress.’ As a writer, nobody says anything nice; and the tiny bad things they say set up camp and breed.” She adds that, whereas her twenties were about learning the discipline of writing, her thirties seem to be about self-esteem. “If you don’t wake up feeling good about yourself,” she says, and I can hear her smiling through the receiver, “no one else will make you so.”
The evident smile is hidden in her voice. Her advice to hopeful writers is, simply, to “expect the flak.” Despite it, The Mineral Palace has been well received throughout the country as a delightfully insightful and beautifully wrought first work of fiction, nominated for a coveted Young Lions Award from the New York Public Library in 2000. In 2001, The Village Voice named her a “writer on the verge.”
She continues to adamantly reject the old adage that writers “write about what they know,” claiming that she is less self-indulgent when doing the reverse. And as for the facts? What is the truth of an event? “Even in non-fiction, even in memoir,” she balks, “hell, people are winging it.”