Your story “The Frenzy” describes a weekend trip to Cape May, New Jersey, taken by a married father in his forties and the nineteen-year-old woman he calls his “teen-aged mistress.” How did the story begin for you? Did the idea come first, the characters, or the setting?

“The Frenzy” has two sources. One is the spectacle of an astonishing “feeding frenzy” of hundreds of thousands or millions of fish of all sizes, which I must have seen decades ago from a boat in the Atlantic Ocean, like the one mentioned in the story; it made a lasting impression upon me, and makes me shudder even now.

The other source is the setting: suburban New Jersey, the Garden State Parkway, Barnegat Light, and beautiful historic Cape May in the off-season. The right backdrop for a man hoping to revivify his life in some way. Also, to a lesser extent, the gritty urban New York City landscape around Varick Street—a neighborhood of expensive lofts in buildings that, from the exterior, seem minimal, grim.

“The Frenzy” seems to me a very New Jersey story, an adventure of naïve hope, cynicism, humbling, and humiliation—an ending that is surprising to the male protagonist but perhaps also to the female character.

At times, the man, Cassidy, seems like a stereotypical philandering suburban husband—narcissistic, domineering, but convinced of his own good intentions. At others, there are undertones of malevolence, potential violence. Is Cassidy banally self-aggrandizing, or is he something worse? Or do you want to keep the reader unsure?

Cassidy would appear to be a man yearning for an experience that gives meaning to his life, which seems to have atrophied, lost its significance. He has an unexplored capacity for brutality, which he is on the brink of revealing—but doesn’t, quite. Cape May is a place out of time, in a sense, ahistoric, a kind of alternate moral universe, where, if he wishes, he could punish Brianna at will—or so he thinks. At the same time, he is a middle-aged man fearful of throwing out his back. He hates seeing Brianna on her cellphone because he knows that she is texting a friend circle of people her own age, sending them pictures, messages, of a kind that she would never send him.

Brianna does initially pursue Cassidy, and although she seems willing to take or leave the affair, she is the one who calls Cassidy and asks to go on a drive. What do you think she is looking for with him? A replacement for the parents she’s fallen out with? Someone who can, literally, take her places—an entertaining diversion from friends her own age? Does she see him as someone she can control, thanks to his attraction to her?

It is not my understanding that people always behave with clear motives. Brianna is an impulsive person; she acts without thinking of consequences. She leaves Cassidy precipitously, surprising him by being so decisive. But, in fact, she is behaving instinctively, to save herself, leaving in the way she left her friend in his apartment on the Lower East Side. The same way she will leave others in the future. In a way, Brianna basks in her own being, behaving as she does simply because she can—which is possibly typical of some young women of her generation. They are not children any longer but they behave in childish ways.

The standard narrative in relationships like this is that the older man has the wealth and power and calls the shots, and the younger woman enters into the affair willingfully but innocently and is damaged in some way by it. This story follows that trajectory up to a point, and then flips it. Did you know from the start that that would happen?

Yes, the destination was always the unflattering, deflating voice at the door saying, “Housekeeping”—suggesting a perfunctory sort of cleanup of a mess made by people like Cassidy and Brianna. The romantic/erotic adventure has ended, and now a maid appears. But Cassidy, the seemingly dominant male, is naked, exposed. Whatever happens to him, he deserves.

How do you feel about the ongoing debate about characters’ “likability”? Do they need to be likable in order to keep the reader interested in—and empathizing with—them?

It would never occur to me to measure fictional characters by their “likability”—that seems very limited, trite. I never read prose fiction expecting to “like”—or “dislike”—characters but, rather, to be surprised, moved to emotion of some kind, by a story that is unusual in some way. Does one “like” or “dislike” Macbeth, Raskolnikov, Captain Ahab, among countless others? Literature is a texture of words evoking life in the most vivid ways—psychologically, physically.

I am most powerfully drawn to places, settings. I want to see, hear, smell, “feel” the atmosphere of a place. The Jersey Shore in the off-season is one such place. The misfired adventure of “The Frenzy” is exactly appropriate to the off-season at the Jersey Shore. It is neither “likable” nor “unlikable.” Like a feeding frenzy, it just is. ♦